April 2020 | Sight&Sound | 37more vividly than if he’d just been a distant witness.
Humphrey Jennings attempted something similar when
he transplanted the Nazi obliteration of the Czech village
of Lidice to a demographically similar Welsh mining
community in The Silent Village (1943), made only a few
years after the Nazi annexation of the Sudetenland had
been notoriously dismissed by Neville Chamberlain as
“a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom
we know nothing”.
Often it was in the relevant authorities’ interest to
ensure that we knew nothing. Although it was widely
known in Poland that the spring 1940 massacre of more
than 20,000 Polish army officers and other members of
the intelligentsia in Ukraine’s Katyn Forest had been car-
ried out by Soviet forces, the official story that it was a
Nazi massacre carried out three years later remained in
place until a belated Soviet admission of culpability in- One of the Katyn victims was cavalry officer Jakub
Wajda, and his son Andrzej planned to make Katyn
for decades before it finally emerged in 2007. Wajda’s
sombre, intensely moving film concludes with a recon-
struction of the massacre itself, and what truly horrifies
is how primitive it is, as victims are lined up and shot in
the back of the head: the only concession to 20th-century
technology is the bulldozer filling in the mass graves.
Elem Klimov’s Come and See (1985), a major influ-
ence on The Painted Bird (Marhoul cast Klimov’s lead
actor Alexei Kravchenko in conscious tribute), similarly
shows how mass destruction can be perpetrated with
the most basic methods, provided there are enough fa-
natics willing to use them. Klimov’s equivalent of Katyn’s
climax involves villagers deliberately burned alive in a
barn, a method of slaughter frequently practised by
Oskar Dirlewanger, the head of an SS unit that was for-
mally charged with hunting down active partisans but
in practice found it easier simply to murder whoever was
perceived to be in their way.
The events in Come and See and The Painted Bird
While much of the novel’s animal abuse is carried over
to the film, it’s invariably framed and cut in such a way
that the cine-literate viewer can work out how the effect
was achieved even on first viewing (and thankfully the
book’s most brutally graphic section, involving a rabbit
that regains consciousness while being skinned, was
dropped at the script stage). The same goes for child
sexual abuse (significantly toned down from the book),
and the scene in which a man is eaten alive by starving
rats – described with lip-smacking relish by Kosinski in a
decidedly James Herbert-like passage – happens entirely
off screen once the narrative ingredients have been estab-
lished. The most shocking moments all have a clear psy-
chological point, often to do with loss of innocence: the
aftermath of a brutal eye-gouging is followed by the child
witness’s naive attempt to “make things better”, while
the murder of a woman, Ludmila, deemed to have be-
haved immorally, is rendered doubly disturbing by an act
of shockingly sexualised violence that is itself carried out
by a much older woman. Marhoul has a double defence:
every horrific set piece in his film is drawn directly from
the literary classic that inspired it, and there is no doubt
that equivalent atrocities occurred on a regular basis in
the bloodlands throughout the 1940s (and indeed more
recently elsewhere: Bosnia, Rwanda, Iraq, Syria, etc).
He also has the defence that it’s a work of fiction:
shortly before Agnieszka Holland’s recent Mr. Jones
opened commercially in the UK, the Sunday Times ran a
shock-horror story about how its journalist protagonist
Gareth Jones is seen in the film indulging – albeit unwit-
tingly – in cannibalism, something that almost certainly
never happened in real life. But cannibalism undoubt-
edly was a side-effect of the mass starvation engendered
in Ukraine in 1932-3 by Soviet grain-requisition policies,
and while Holland and screenwriter Andrea Chalupa
could conceivably have not involved Jones directly, the
moment when he realises what he’s eating conveys a
first-person shock at the full horror of the Holodomor
SOLDIERS OF FORTUNE
Václav Marhoul (pictured
on set, opposite) attracted
a strong international cast,
including (clockwise from
top left) Stellan Skarsgård,
Harvey Keitel, Udo Kier
(centre) and Barry PepperReviewed on
page 72