Come and See (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

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As Nazi forces encroach on his small village in present-day Belarus, teenage Flyora eagerly joins the Soviet resistance. It is set almost entirely from a single perspective, the young Flyora, played by a wildly talented Aleksei Kravchenko; I appreciate the raw, grainy documentary approach and personal story conveyed here. First they have recorded an excellent 10-minute interview with director of photography Roger Deakins. Come and See bears comparison to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood, which likewise narrates a young boy’s conscription into the irregular Russian resistance to German invasion.

Claude Lanzmann's 10-hour documentary Shoah captured perhaps the most visceral stories from all aspects of life from that time, but it's with Soviet film director Elm Klimov's 1985 film Come And See that some of the most disturbing visuals are shown that have capsulated the Holocaust in a strikingly visual way, similar to the recent film 1917, a vision that is not soon forgotten. There is some kind of nasty elegance to the camerawork here as it puts the beauty of the land in the background and its wonderful nature that has to watch babies getting thrown in the air to their death and young girls being dragged by their hair as soldiers laugh. As they journey, the soundtrack is filled with alarmingly loud bombs and explosions that almost sound like a hellish symphony of classical music conducted by evil, complete with screams, dead carcasses, and flies eating the flesh of the dead. I did a few comparisons with the old DVD release I have in my library and to be honest was quite surprised by the massive upgrade. The color grading job is quite similar to the one from the DVD release, only with much more improved and better balanced primaries and nuances.Not so in Elem Klimov’s 1985 film Come and See, in which relentless bombings and frenetic camerawork shatter the Belarusian countryside into an incoherent, fabulistic geography, and the invading Germans appear to coalesce out of the fog on the horizon like menacing apparitions. While fleeing back into the woods with Flyora, Glasha momentarily glimpses a heap of bodies, Flyora’s family and neighbors, piled on the edge of the village where tendrils of smoke still waft from their chimneys. Nearly blocked from being made by Soviet censors, who took seven years to approve it's script, Come and See is perhaps the most visceral, impossible-to-forget antiwar film ever made.

Addition: Interestingly, I learned through members of our forum that the film was released with a 3. The carnage they discover overwhelms them and they leave the area, but shortly after Flyora begins to realize that the entire country has been set on fire. Legendary Cinematographer Roger Deakins talks about the look of Come and See and how the filmmakers used the cameras. The only other release of Come and See that I have in my library is this two-disc DVD set from Nouveaux Pictures, which for a long period of time offered the best technical presentation of the film. The 1080p/24hz high-definition encode is sourced from a new 2K restoration performed by Mosfilm and scanned from the 35mm original negative.

Outside of some archival material found on previous DVDs Criterion does appear to have ported everything over from the Kino/RusCiCo discs, which included three interviews: one with director Elem Klimov (21-minutes), actor Aleksei Kravchenko (14-minutes), and production designer Viktor Petrov (8-minutes). dont think its as disturbing as others Ive watched (martyrs disturbed me more), but its a really good movie. With around 133 minutes of bonus material, there is plenty of information about the production and making of the movie to watch, including new and vintage interviews with the cast and crew, documentaries with real people who went through the Holocaust, and more. The two kids must survive a trek across mud, hills, forests, and bodies while also dodging bullets, bombs, and a variety of enemy soldiers.

Similar to Stalker, this restoration drops the tint that was placed over black-and-white sequences (archival footage in this case) and it is presented in simple black-and-white. Grain is very fine but is still visible and rendered cleanly, and I didn’t note any artifacts on screen.

It ends up making for a great analysis of the film’s visuals and what makes them so striking and impactful. The close-ups on the protagonist throughout the film are especially something, as it becomes far clearer how his face is aging as the film progresses.

This extra debuts three of those five documentaries, titled Handful of Sand, Mute Scream, and Woman From The Killed Village. It’s a cinematic simulacrum of the overwhelming, discombobulating sensory experience of war that would have an influence on virtually every war movie made after it.Criterion's Solaris Blu-ray removed a blue tint while their edition of Stalker made a sepia tint more prominent. At any rate, even though they’re primarily interviews the films are not easy to watch, the participants recounting such horrors as being buried alive or gathered into a church with the knowledge of what was going to follow. Very moving moment in 'Bird' when a child is in peril, and then is rescued by a Russian soldier, who is none other than the same lead actor from "Come and See", actor Aleksei Kravchenko. We experience the German invasion of Belarus through Flyora (Aleksey Kravchenko), a teenager who joins the local partisan militia after discovering a rifle buried in the sand.