ABSTRACT
In a climactic scene of his 1985 film Come and See, a harrowing account of a thirteen-year-old’s passage from boy to seasoned partisan during the Nazi occupation of Belarus, Elem Klimov breaks with the basic realism of the rest of the film and inserts a shockingly unrealistic device. While the battered and traumatized youngster Flor shoots at a picture of Hitler left behind by the marauding SS troops, viewers watch interpolated newsreel footage of Stuka dive bombers, marching troops, Nazi rallies, street parades, and World War I battles—accelerated and run in reverse. The scene ends only when the documentary footage has been “blasted back” to a still photograph of the toddler Hitler with his mother, his uncanny, piercing dark eyes staring out from the faces of both mother and son, eyes familiar from countless pictures of the psychopathic dictator and mass murderer. Seized with horror, Flor stops shooting, perhaps recognizing the resonance of his own cathartic symbolic violence against the photograph with the literal murder of women and children he has witnessed in a genocidal SS raid against a village.
