A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Saturday, March 28, 2020

Come and See (Elem Klimov, 1985)

Aleksey Kravchenko in Come and See
Cast: Aleksey Kravchenko, Olga Mironova, Ljubomiras Laucevicius, Vladas Bagdonas, Jüri Lumiste, Viktors Lorencs, Evgeniy Tilicheev. Screenplay: Ales Adamovich, Elem Klimov. Cinematography: Aleksey Rodionov. Production design: Viktor Petrov. Film editing: Valeriya Belova. Music: Oleg Yanchenko.

Elem Klimov's hard and harrowing Come and See runs a risk that it almost doesn't avoid: Parts of it are filled with such sustained horror and tension that a viewer can grow almost numb and dismissive. It elicits the response: "It's only a movie. These are actors." But such actors, especially Aleksey Kravchenko, then only 14 and picked by the director precisely for his lack of acting experience, even though Klimov was concerned that putting him through what the character must undergo in the film might be damaging to his mental health. (Kravchenko apparently survived intact, and went on to study acting and to build a steady career in film and television.) It's perhaps worth comparing the intensity of Klimov's film to that of Larisa Shepitko's The Ascent (1977), which put its actors through real hardships to create its portrait of life during wartime. Shepitko, married to Klimov, died in an automobile accident in 1979, and her film almost seems like a challenge to her husband to match or excel. In fact, Come and See seems to have exhausted Klimov as a filmmaker: He didn't make another film for the remainder of his life; he died at 70 in 2003. As harsh as the realism of Come and See is, it also has poetic touches in its cinematography and use of landscape, reminding me of another film about a war-torn boyhood, Andrei Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood (1966).