by ALI KIRMANI
It is often believed that no war film can be an anti-war film. While Steven Spielberg is a rare exception who sees all war films as anti-war, a majority of film doyens such as François Truffaut have held that every war film is inadvertently a pro-war film. It is believed that war films do not succeed at being anti-war because their craft as a medium fails to convey the horror that is war. There is however an exception that puts aside all contestation.
This year, the Russian film Come and See, directed by Elem Klimov, completes 35 years. Often considered to be the only real anti-war movie in all of cinema, Come and See, is centred on the Nazi German occupation of Belarus during World War II, and the events which are witnessed by a young Belarusian teenager called Flyora, who against his mother’s wishes, partakes in the Belarusian resistance movement, and thereafter witnesses the human condition of war.
It is remarkably documented that after watching Full Metal Jacket (1987) a young audience came out of the theatre enticed by the idea of war. In Come and See no such sequence or shot exists that will want you to take a piece of that world for your mind’s souvenir. It is not just the superiority of its realism that makes Come and See the only anti-war film. It is the quality of truth that makes it a one-of-a-kind film – a war film of the horror genre.