Klimov was married to film Soviet film director, screenwriter and actress Larisa Shepitko ('Voskhozhdenie' ['The Ascent']).
Klimov is known for directing the 1965 Soviet black and white drama/comedy-drama film 'Pokhozhdeniya zubnogo vracha' ('Adventures of a Dentist') and the 1981 Soviet biography history/drama film 'Rasputin'. The latter film's original title was 'Agoniya' ('Agony').
Between this time, Shepitko died in a car crash near the city of Tver with four members of her shooting team.
This was while scouting locations for her planned adaptation of Russian writer Valentin Rasputin's 1976 fiction novel Farewell to Matyora. Shepitko passed on July 2, 1979. She was 41.
The following year, Klimov made a tribute to her with the twenty-five-minute 1980 Soviet black and white/color documentary/short film 'Larisa'.
Three years later, Klimov finished Shepitko's last work. This was her 1983 Soviet/Ukrainian drama film 'Proshchanie' ('Farewell').
Two years later, Klimov co-wrote and directed his final feature film and testament of which he is best known.
This was the 1985 Soviet war/dram film 'Idi i smotri' ('Come and See'). The film is perhaps the most visceral, impossible-to-forget antiwar film ever made.
Originally called 'Kill Hitler', the feature is based on Belarusian-Soviet writer and critic Ales Adamovich's 1978 book I Am from the Fiery Village. He was highly regarded for his austere yet deeply humane antiwar stance, moral courage and uncompromising honesty.
When Adamovich was a teenager, and still a school student, he became a partisan unit member in 1942-1943.
During this time, the Nazis systematically torched hundreds of Belarusian villages and exterminated their inhabitants.
Later, he wrote one of his most recognized works, the 1971 fiction book The Khatyn Story, and co-wrote the screenplay for the film, which was based on his real-life experiences as a messenger and a guerilla fighter during the war.
The film was also based on the 1977 book Ya iz ognennoj Derevni (The Kings and the Pawns), of which Adamovich co-authored.
Set in 1943, 'Come and See' tells of the invasion of a village in Byelorussia by German forces.
This sends Belarusian teenager Florya (Aleksey Kravchenko) into the forest to join the weary Resistance fighters, against his family's wishes. There he meets a girl, Glasha (Olga Mironova), who accompanies him back to his village.
Upon returning home, Florya finds that his family and fellow peasants are massacred.
Afterwards, his continued survival amidst the brutal debris of war becomes increasingly nightmarish; a battle between despair and hope.
The film displays an exhaustingly devastating portrayal of war while also mixing hyperrealism with an underlying surrealism.
It also includes philosophical existentialism with poetical, psychological, political and apocalyptic themes.
For 'Come and See', Klimov drew on his own childhood for the film. "As a young boy, I had been in hell," he explained. He and his mother and baby brother were evacuated on a raft across the Volga river during the battle of Stalingrad.
"The city was ablaze up to the top of the sky. The river was also burning. It was night, bombs were exploding, and mothers were covering their children with whatever bedding they had, and then they would lie on top of them.
Had I included everything I knew and shown the whole truth, even I could not have watched it."
'Come and See' received generally positive critical reception upon release, and received the FIPRESCI prize at the 14th Moscow International Film Festival. It has since come to be considered one of the greatest films ever made.
The film had to fight eight years of censorship from the Soviet authorities before the film was finally allowed to be produced in its entirety.
The original Belarusian title of 'Come and See' derives from Chapter 6 of The Apocalypse of John (or the book of Revelation), where in the first, third, fifth, and seventh verse it is written: (Greek: "Erchou kai ide" [English: "Come and see"]).
This is written as an invitation to look upon the destruction caused by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and is found in Chapter 8, verses 7–8.
These verses have been cited as being particularly relevant to the film:
"And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, "Come and see!" And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth."
According to Klimov, 'Come and See' was so shocking for audiences, however, that ambulances were sometimes called in to take away particularly impressionable viewers, both in the Soviet Union and abroad.
According to Klimov, during one of the after-the-film discussions, an elderly German stood up and said: "I was a soldier of the Wehrmacht; moreover, an officer of the Wehrmacht.
I traveled through all of Poland and Belarus, finally reaching Ukraine. I will testify: everything that is told in this film is the truth. And the most frightening and shameful thing for me is that this film will be seen by my children and grandchildren".
'Come and See' is a senses-shattering plunge into the dehumanizing horrors of war, rendered with a feverish, otherworldly intensity by expressionistic sound design and Russian cinematographer Aleksei Rodionov's subjective camera work.
Asian-American screenwriter and filmmaker Adisakdi Tantimedh wrote of 'Come and See': "Most war films claim to be antiwar, but have their cake and eat it too by reveling in the gung-ho heroism of competent, can-do heroes. Come and See offers no such relief or comfort. It shows there are only victims in war."
In June 2010, Roger Ebert wrote of the film: "It is unutterably depressing, because history can never undo itself, and is with us forever."
Klimov had been active from 1959–1985.
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