Come and See’s frames are often choked with this fog—watching the film, one almost expects to see condensation on the screen’s surface—and Klimov fills the soundtrack with a kind of audio fog: the droning of bombers and surveillance planes, the whine of prolonged eardrum-ringing, an ambient and sparse score by Oleg Yanchenko.

The Blu-ray release offers such vastly superior technical presentation that I actually felt like I hadn't see the film before. Each film features one or more participants recounting the horrors they witnessed and survived during the war as the Nazis made their way through, burning down villages and murdering the villagers. He covers some of the same ground that his brother did in the other interview (including how the title Come and See came about, though it differs a bit here) but expands on many details, like the events that led up to the film finally being made, and then production specific things like filming the barn sequence, where they ended up using locals who were probably around when the actual events happened. Since 2001, we've brought you uncompromising, candid takes on the world of film, music, television, video games, theater, and more.Cinematography: If cinematography can be seen as packing a collection of memorable images, this one is top drawer material. The practical effects in the makeup look excellent with fantastic wrinkles, age marks, dirt, and bloody bits of human body parts strewn about. The Criterion Collection has announced that it will add six new titles to its Blu-ray catalog this June: Come and See (1985), The Cameraman (1928), Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), An Unmarried Woman (1978), and Tokyo Olympiad (1965). 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.

But with this one, she also talks about how she got her life back together after the war, showing how one can still work to move on. 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.The Criterion Collection presents Elem Klimov’s Come and See on Blu-ray in its original aspect ratio of 1. The three films are Handful of Sand (10-minutes), Mute Scream (11-minutes), and Woman from the Killed Village (28-minutes), and all were filmed around 1975 according to the notes here (looking them up online suggests different years for each).

Dialogue may be the only weak element: in comparison to the everything else it comes off incredibly flat and does stick out compared to every other aspect of the track. Fine object-detail really dives off of the screen in every shot, from fine hairs and wrinkles found in the numerous close-ups throughout the film, to the trees, vegetation, and debris presented in longer shots. The color palette is mostly all doom and gloom with a ton of foggy blues and grays, but it's mixed with some spectacular shots of bright greenery in the forest as well as some hot red, orange, and yellow fire from bullets, bombs, and explosions that contrast well with the colder, dark nature of the film. The early scene in which he departs from his mother and sisters presents a disconcerting, even alienating complex of emotions: the histrionic panic of his mother (Tatyana Shestakova), who alternately embraces and rails against him; the hardened indifference of the soldiers who’ve come to retrieve him; and the jejune oblviousness of Floyria himself, who mugs at his younger siblings to mock his mother’s concerns. A short Russian TV documentary from 1985 titled How Come and See Was Filmed confirms their impressions, while an interview with Klimov’s brother, German, focuses on the filmmaker’s broader career.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. Filmmaker Viktor Dashuk made a five-part documentary series that showcases the atrocities and horrors that were experienced by the Belarusian people during the Holocaust. 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.