Come and See (1985) by Elem Klimov.
“A friend who works on the concept of war made me discover this film. It’s the last film by Elem Klimov. It exhausted him to sickness. I can see on the faces of the actors what they went through. It’s a film entirely shot with a steadycam, in 1984, with a heavy machinery ; a film in which the death of God is really convincing and has nothing to do with the proclivity of the Church or the Orthodox mysticism we can see in other russian directors.
It’s a really scary movie about the massacre of a Byellorussian village. You can see a cow shot with real bullets. Come and See shows refugees who need meat and milk ; it’s obvious they had to kill this cow. Klimov films the eye of the dying animal, I got dizzy in it. I saw the earth rotation in it, it brought me back to Un chien Andalou. It’s a film that make me want to write about it, I hadn’t adhere this way to a film for a long time. It’s a film about chaos, war, pain. They must have shoot it chronologically, it can’t have been done in any other way. On the face of this young paysant who went through these Dantesque circles, you see a real transformation. No tricks, no make-up : he really felt the tragical elements of the story. The sound, which contains many noise elements, pieces of Mozarts, is also astonishing.
A long time ago, I saw at the Cinematheque a documentary Klimov made about his wife. I wasn’t very enthusiastic. They also shown Farewell to Matyora, the film his wife couldn’t finish because of her death in a car accident and Klimov finished. I also kind of missed it, it must have been my fault, it’s impossible that a director who makes an extrordinary film like Come and See can make minor things. Seven or eight years of preparation, nine months of shooting, Come and See made him sick. In one of the extras of the very good French DVD, you can see him getting sick and suffering to have to talk about it. You can feel he can not go beyond this film, that he can not go further. He went to the end of the experience.”

By Antoine Thirion, 2008, February the 13th in Paris.

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