The streaming era has made untold thousands of movies available at our fingertips. The problem? The vast majority of those movies were made in only the last two decades or so. If you’re a burgeoning cinephile looking to continue your film education, finding films from earlier than the Clinton administration is more difficult than it should be. But it’s not impossible: you just need to know where to look.
A good place to start? YouTube.
The site best known for cat videos, conspiracy theories and DIY home repair tutorials is a semi-secret repository for movies unavailable on other platforms. Many classics of the cult, arthouse and international variety are out there to stream, completely for free. Of course, the drawbacks are dodgy transfers and possible copyright violations. But if you want to watch one of the greatest anti-war films of all-time, well, it’s there, it’s in 1080p, and it’s legal.
Be forewarned, though: 1985’s Come and See will leave you absolutely shell-shocked.
Set in Nazi-occupied Belarus, the final film by Soviet director Elem Klimov follows a young soldier named Florya as he witnesses horrors beyond his comprehension. Time Out – which has not only named the movie one of the best war movies of all-time but one of the greatest overall – put it this way:
‘As unsparing as cinema gets, the influence of Elem Klimov’s sui generis war movie transcends the genre in a way that not even Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan can match. At its heart it’s a coming-of-age story that follows a young Belarusian boy (Aleksei Kravchenko) through unspeakable horror as Nazi death squads visit an apocalypse on his region. Alongside its historical truths, the film’s grammar and visual language – there are passages that play like an ultra-violent acid trip – are what truly elevates it. Like an Hieronymus Bosch masterpiece, the images here can never be unseen.’
Currently, Come and See is not free to stream anywhere else in the US. It’s on YouTube thanks to Mosfilm, the century-old Russian studio that has produced many of the country’s most renowned films. Beginning in 2011, the studio began uploading a trove of Russian films to its YouTube channel, in high-def and with English subtitles.
In addition to Come and See, the page channel has nearly full filmographies from legendary directors like Sergei Eisenstein and Andrei Tarkovsky – so you’ll have a lot more to dig into, once you’re done being traumatised.
Stream Come and See on YouTube here.
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