But I would like to limit recommendations in this blog to a different class of film that comes along every so often. These are the "residue" films that transcend even the best of the medium and -- almost always through compelling narrative and character development -- leave you with a residue of sadness or nightmare or unresolved moral dillema that you couldn't shake if you tried.  These films are emotional traps, in the best sense of the word. Sometimes for years.

I am sure many of you know the feeling. You'll be walking along and you suddenly realise that you are still "living" in a film you saw months before.  The narrative might have had a superficial exit of sorts,  but that same exit slammed shut if you were seeking an easy psychological way out from the film's emotional complexity or challenging moral dillemas.

The best way I know how to make this distinction is recalling the day my daughter's hampster died. She was inconsolable, for five minutes at most, and then wanted to know if we were still going out for pizza. First the pathos and then, even more quickly, the pepperoni.

Yet in the years that followed, when the same daughter  (and all of us)  lost Michael,  a wonderful, creative and occasionally insufferable friend to HIV/AIDS, we entered a space that still surrounds us more than 15 years later. I am talking about films that do something like this.  

Thanks to my colleague Mick Hurbis Cherrier's suggestion of one film,  I am now entering my third month stuck in a relentless nightmare of war. So let me recommend Elem Klmov's "Come and See." We had been arguing in the department whether, per Truffaut's assertion,  anti-war films were impossible because of the inevitable tendency of film to aestheticize horror. 

So Mick pulled this film out of his hat, and in one viewing, Truffaut's claim -- for me at least -- was demolished. 

Check it out. You'll never be the same. This is war -- relentlessly sad, horrifyingly violent, and morally confusing.  A nightmare.

Since I've been going on about faces rather a lot (more on BODIES, soon), I couldn't very well fail to mention this little chap, Aleksei Kravchenko, in COME AND SEE, which I re-saw recently at a screening I put on at Screen Academy Scotland.

(Screening this film is problematic: I was approached by more than one person with the question, "What are you showing tonight?" and when I replied, "Come and See," they'd say, "But what are you showing?" and the whole thing turned into a protracted Abbott & Costello routine.)

Elem Klimov's astonishingly powerful and horrific WWII movie is another of those films which is relentlessly dark and negative, but never becoems depressing. One emerges glad to be alive. A big part of the film's power comes from the extraordinary central performance by young Kravchenko, whose commitment to the role of a young partisan fighting the Nazis in Belarus was so strong that Klimov and his crew  feared for the boy's sanity. Although Klimov's humanitarian impulses were not strong enough to prevent him from, like William Wellman in his 30s gangster films, using live ammo...

Anyhow, the face is eloquent, what I call a PROFOUND FACE, and the performance powerful, and at times Kravchenko looks like a bad drawing (like I might draw) of my nephew Calum, which also intensifies my emotional responses... although what we really get is the Universal Face of Suffering Humanity, filtered through the specifics of a single person's features. 

The makeup is also hugely important, as the hero's shattering experiences gradually give him the weathered face of an old man...

Klimov's wife, Larissa Shepitko, directed THE ASCENT, which is maybe the ultimate film about the Eastern Front, whereas Klimov's movie is more of a descent into Hell than an altogether realistic portrait of a campaign, but the effect is of an engrossing psychological realism, with the commitment to P.O.V. maintained relentlessly: when the boy is deafened by exploding shells, the soundtrack is engulfed by a droning, ringing tinnitus effect that continues, slowly fading, for the next half hour of screen time. Compared to this, those moments in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN where Tom Hanks' hearing is affected are like the Tom & Jerry version.

Klimov's heavy use of steadicam reminds me of another film of sweeping movement towards death, acts of violence we don't want to see but are driven ineluctably towards: the BBC play ELEPHANT, written by Bernard MacLaverty, directed by Alan Clarke.

"Flor, My dear child! They killed your folks!"
 

During a war, more than armies and governments, it the children who are affected most. The images of the atrocities and violence in the war makes an impact that is life-changing for them. The subject of children of war has been a less tackled one when it comes to Cinema. Andrei Tarkovsky's Ivan's childhood (1962) gave as an immensely personal account of war as seen by the title character. Another critical film on the same subject is Elem Klimov's Idi I Smotri (1985). The film is hailed as one of the best anti-war films for its depiction of the influence of war on children.

It's World War 2 and Hitler is plundering in the western borders. Florya is called for military service against the wishes of his mother. The youngest at the camp, he is left behind by the troops. He meets another young girl the camp and both of them try to run from the onslaught of the German flights and paratroops. There is this beautiful scene here where both of them play and dance in the rain amidst all the bombings- A scenic reminder that children are after all, children. The journey continues to Florya's home where he discovers that his family has been killed. Responsibilities increase and Florya goes in search of food for the villagers and survives a series of ordeals that kills all of his mates during the journey. Meanwhile, the resistance forces manage to capture the German troops and the latter is exterminated without consideration.

The climactic scene where Florya continuously fires at a portrait of Hitler is cross-cut with the footage of the rise of Hitler played in reverse. This powerful sequence shows how Florya has been affected by war and all the mishaps he wants to undo. A fantastic performance by Alexei Kravchenko as Florya and disturbing scenes such as the bonfire of people and the the crossfire across barren field that kills Florya's mates (Believe it or not, a real cow was killed for the scene) won this film the Golden Prize at the Moscow Film Festival in 1985.

If you think war is glamorous, then watch Elem Klimov's Idi I Smotri.

The Nazi invasion and occupation of Belarus here is one long, terrifying, sickening, depraved carnival of venality.

We see through the eyes of an impressionable young peasant boy, Florya. We follow him as he desperately tries to join up with the partisans. We endure bombings, executions, dispossessions, humiliations, massacres. We are scared, numbed, shocked. This is film as total immersion: movement, colour, shapes, sounds, all conspire to drown us in a growing nausea.