Creatures in Shards: Elem Klimov’s ‘Come and See’
HUG “And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, ‘Come and see.’ And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.” ~ The Book of Revelation, New Testament. To Dig We dig. In times of our stolen and mauled childhood, we begin to dig deeper into the earth—seeking meaning and refuge in buried rifles and grenades, toys to our existence. Seeking meaning where there are none. So does Florya, the young/old boy who takes us through a creaturely journey during an extraordinary time in Belarusian history—its encounter with the advancing German military in 1943, during what the Soviets call ‘The Great Patriotic War’(WWII). “Playing a game? Digging? Well, go on digging you little bastards,” an old man shouts at two boys right at the outset of the film. And we keep on doing just that—digging underneath our layers of sanity, even as we travel with a humanity that is stripped off all its veneer. No battle scenes, no feats of heroism or sacrifice; nor any unfolding love story in times of war distract us. It is an unalloyed realism of life, one that only war can spawn, scene after scene. In fact, the sting of realism veers off to hyper-real forms. It is this borderline that tantalizes the spectators . The verisimilitude of being engulfed in an apocalyptic mayhem is brutally interrupted constantly with baroque, expressionistic interventions throughout the narrative. Very early in the film, Florya tramples on a nest full of eggs, some of which are half-born chicks. This happens unintentionally but the tone is set. The important point is that Klimov never makes history and politics irrelevant by atomizing them into horror (what Susan Sontag had said of Arbus and Herzog). Instead, the camera takes on a huge moral responsibility in depicting what order human beings can both endure and inflict simultaneously—Klimov is not a bored anthropologist seeking fascination in the novelty of horror. The screen pulsates in Come and See. All the time. Like Terrence Malick, but in a much too sharp a fashion, Klimov twists and unfurls the landscape in light, colour and other non-human variables such that the multiple sites of slaughter, genocide and betrayal that mark the countryside turn the visceral into normal. The here-and-now cannot satisfy the journey. So we elongate space and duration that we might receive some kind of metaphysical clarity. But the prolonged gaze in the direction of our metaphysical quest is not one of mystical unity but an obtuse one, whose real focus is to show how history turns expressionistic within our viscera.For example, in a remarkable series of shots, a cow is guided across to what seems to be open, unguarded terrain. And a firefight breaks out. The cow stands untouched by the furious engagement, until suddenly struck by a barrage of tracer bullets. Finally its eyes rapidly shift and dilate before death—an indelible set of images that carve remarkable audio-visual statements. In fact, animals are a key motif in the film—constantly placed alongside humans in uncomprehending naivete. The camera lingers on these animals during violent incursions. Unseen birds chirp and a low-frequency whir follows us often. Florya and Glasha hide up following the attack in the fir forest and a stork wanders about and peers in at them in their cavern. The same stork appears twice, almost unnoticed, at the edge of the well and in its dark, perfectly still surface we see Florya’s face reflected, until it is ominously extirpated by the impact of a drop of water. Much later, the German commander fondles his pet marmoset while his men prepare to torch the church in a scene where the graphic impact is again lengthened and made hyper-real. Once the massacre gets under way the marmoset is spared the spectacle when a German helmet is placed over it. The pat by a loving owner’s hand on the helmet completes this fleeting but all too persuasive image. Much of the notorious massacre scene goes un-scored, the sounds of villagers in disarray, barking dogs, sudden gunfire, and Nazi laughter take over.Often images speak for themselves, and sometimes silence stings us with its eloquence. In an early scene of a German bombing raid, Florya temporarily goes deaf. The audio takes his subjective point of view, and wehear the same deafening ring. This shattering ring is thereafter brought back at strategic moments. At other times, a cacophonous fusion of beastly noises, droning hums, occasional excerpts of classical music, and of course, the expected terrifying sounds of war follow us. In the film’s final scene fittingly we hear: the Lacrimosa from Mozart’s Requiem. Nothing is a tableaux though—sonic or visual. Klimov is not documenting war. Rather digging is a relentless motif, which keeps taking us beneath the surface: into another real. At one point as he breaks blindly through the crowd of keening and wailing peasant women, Florya comes upon the old man whom he and the other boys had tormented on the beach only days before. Near death, the man is a mass of charred flesh: “I was set on fire,” he gasps. “I warned you not to dig. I begged them to kill me. They laughed. I said not to dig.” No, violence is not gratuitous at all. It happens. Because historical events make it happen. Simone Weil had said of life’s nameless horrors, that “we have to accept the fact that they exist simply because they do exist.” Klimov bridges distance with an identification that is deeply uncomfortable, for it opens one to the pain of the other.And in rare moments the reckless vitality of youth seems to be impervious to horror: like the scene where Glasha dances happily on a log for