Come and See

Elim Klimov’s Come and See (1985) is an astonishing and harrowing depiction of the “Nazi’s destruction of the Belorussian village of Khatyn” as seen through the eyes of a young boy – our protagonist, Florya. The film is remarkable not only for its seemingly anti-war sentiments, but also because of what could be considered an anti-Soviet focus on the struggle of the individual, Florya, opposed to the Soviet principles of the importance of the over that of the individual. In his essay ‘Come and See: Klimov’s Intimate Epic’, Lloyd Michaels describes exactly how Klimov manages to emphasise Florya’s struggle through his use of cinematic technique:

Klimov deploys an array of cinematic techniques—most prominently close-ups, moving camera, and sound track—to memorialize both the sufferings of the individual survivor, a village boy of about 14 who joins the partisans, and the anonymous tens of thousands of victims of Nazi atrocities as the army burned its way through rural Byelorussia.

Indeed, through his extraordinary use of soundtrack, Klimov manages to take the “formal conventions of socialist realism” it relies upon and turns them into a sort of ‘socialist hyper-realism’. During much of the film we find ourselves seeing the devastation from Florya’s point of view, but for the films entirety the soundtrack serves as a window into the physical and mental impact the events are having on young Florya; for example, after a bomb causes his ear drum to rupture, Klimov uses the soundtrack to portray the confusion and struggle Florya undergoes as for the next half hour or so of the film the sound becomes muffled with a constant ringing noise, replicating the physical sensations Florya is suffering as a result of the explosion. Further still, Klimov intertwines non-diegetic sounds with the diegetic sounds Florya is actually hearing; perhaps used as an indication of what is going on in Florya’s imagination, but certainly in order to heighten the effect of the devastation being portrayed on screen.

Over the course of the film we witness Florya age drastically; originally resembling a young, innocent child, by the end of the film Florya looks like a defeated old man – his hair grey along with severe bags under his eyes which themselves portray a look of sheer terror after witnessing the events exposed to them. It is evident that by portraying the struggle of the individual, particularly through his own eyes, ears and mind, Klimov successfully manages to leave the audience with an unforgettable account of the effects of war through his use of cinematic techniques, a sentiment echoed by David A. Cook’s statement:

We are taken on a relentless 142-minute journey toward the centre of a horror so profound that the film itself is actually rendered speechless... it achieves such an extraordinary level of intensity in its montage of swooping Steadicam shots and shattering images of atrocity, visual and aural, that we are left with a nearly physical sense of devastation.

Landscape in the Mist

Described by New York Times critic Stephen Holden as a filmmaker who “belongs to a stately modernist tradition that embraces figures as divergent as Michelangelo Antonioni, Robert Bresson and Wim Wenders”, it is easy to draw comparisons between Theodoros Angelopoulos and the aforementioned; however, I get the impression that doing so would not quite do Angelopoulos’ work justice. Much like Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960), Angelopoulos’ Landscape in the Mist (1988) deals with the search for someone who is not there; a search which becomes a “symbolic quest for value in a world that has grown spiritually hollow.” However, whereas the search in L’Avventura is instigated by a disappearance, the search we witness in Landscape in the Mist is a much more “anguished and hopeless” one than in L’Avventura – if you could imagine such a thing.

The film centres around two children, Voula and her younger brother Alexander, who run away from home in an attempt to find their father – who there mother has told them now lives in Germany, far away from their native Greece. It is not long before we realise that the children are not going to find their father; however, the film takes on a much deeper meaning, as the children begin to learn about the real world through the events and people they encounter on their travels; Alexander learns that he must work in return for food; Voula learns about the dangers and brutality one can encounter in the real world in what is easily the most horrific scene in the film; and both children learn about love, trust and friendship from Orestes, a helpful acquaintance they make along the way.

In his otherwise positive review of the film, Holden accuses Angelopoulos’ imagery of verging on the “heavy-handed.” Personally, however, I do not think this is a bad thing. Whilst having a seemingly blank piece of film symbolise the ambivalence of the children’s ongoing search (Orestes tells the children that if they look hard enough they may find a landscape of trees in the mist of the film) only to have the film end with the children embracing a tree they find upon a misty landscape (even if it is suggested they may be dead) isn’t entirely subtle symbolism, it is perhaps Angelopoulos’ ‘heavy-handedness’ that makes these images all the more effective and is perhaps why, as Holden put it, “there are sights in the film that once seen cannot be forgotten.”