SILVER SCREEN

THE FACE THAT WAR LEAVES BEHIND

ANTON LEVITSKY

October 22, 2026

War films often ask us to admire what suffering reveals. Three Soviet masterpieces make that admiration more difficult. Through the faces of soldiers and children, Andrei Tarkovsky, Larisa Shepitko, and Elem Klimov explore courage, compromise, and the destruction of an ordinary life. With the war in Ukraine lending these images renewed urgency, what can cinema preserve, and when does the beauty of its images begin to console us too much?

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The war in Ukraine gives renewed urgency to three Soviet films: Andrei Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood (1962), Larisa Shepitko’s The Ascent (1977), and Elem Klimov’s Come and See (1985). Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, images of soldiers and civilians have made their way into the ordinary rhythm of our days: a face in a trench, a family outside a ruined home, someone waiting for news. Repetition makes such images familiar long before it makes the suffering comprehensible. Responsibility for the invasion belongs to Russia. Recognizing the suffering of individual soldiers on either side does not redistribute that responsibility. It does, however, require us to remember how much a uniform can conceal: fear, exhaustion, attachment to other people, the wish to remain alive. Returning to these films about World War II offers a way to attend to those human particulars. Their histories are distinct from the present conflict, but their questions have acquired a terrible proximity. What does war demand of a person, what does it destroy, and what are we doing when we look at the face it leaves behind?

There is a familiar face in war films: the face of the man who has seen too much, usually attached to an actor handsome enough to make exhaustion look like a grooming decision. Think of Charlie Sheen in Platoon (1986), or Alain Delon in Lost Command (1966). Even Kirk Douglas in Paths of Glory (1957), with his more commanding bearing, belongs somewhere in this gallery. A little dirt, a little blood, a gaze fixed somewhere beyond the camera. We understand immediately that innocence has been lost and character acquired. The face is a certificate of experience. It promises that whatever happened was terrible, but also that something valuable emerged from it. War has performed its dreadful work, and the survivor has become a person worth listening to. It is an attractive arrangement, particularly for those of us who have acquired our knowledge of war in comfortable chairs.

Charlie Sheen in Platoon (1986): Innocence lost, cheekbones intact.

Tarkovsky, Shepitko, and Klimov make that arrangement harder to accept. All three films return to the German invasion of the Soviet Union, but their most persistent territory is the human face. They watch it remembering, resisting, calculating, and coming apart. Seen together, they raise questions that the respectful language surrounding serious war cinema can sometimes conceal: Can a film honor courage without suggesting that the ordeal that produced it was somehow worthwhile? Can it give suffering a form without giving suffering a purpose? The difficulty begins when admiration becomes a way of making devastation bearable.

Of the three, The Ascent brings this difficulty into the sharpest focus. Adapted from the Belarusian writer Vasil Bykov’s novella Sotnikov (1970), it begins with two partisans leaving their hungry unit to find provisions. Sotnikov is sick; Rybak is stronger and more immediately useful. Before any grand question of conscience appears, there are practical questions: where to find food, how to cross exposed ground, whether a body can keep moving. Shepitko makes winter a condition of thought. The snow erases distinctions, distance becomes an accusation, and breathing requires attention. Moral life begins here with a body that would very much prefer to be warm.

The Ascent: Sotnikov’s still, bearded face. A face approaching an icon. The person still deserves a way out.

This matters because the subsequent division between the two men could otherwise become intolerably tidy. One will refuse to collaborate; the other will try to survive through accommodation. A lesser film might distribute nobility and cowardice in advance, ensuring that we recognized each man before either had done anything. Shepitko initially gives Rybak the virtues we tend to trust. He is capable, resourceful, responsive to immediate danger. Sotnikov can appear a burden. Physical strength and moral strength do not coincide, but the film makes us experience their separation rather than merely announcing it. The man who knows how to get through the next hour may be precisely the man most vulnerable to the next bargain.

Rybak’s reasoning is disturbing because it remains recognizable. Survival can be presented as a temporary concession, a tactical adjustment, a promise to do the right thing once circumstances improve. There will be another opportunity. One need not agree inwardly with the people one obeys outwardly. These distinctions are essential to his self-understanding. Shepitko follows the terrible elasticity of that argument: Each compromise makes the next one easier to explain and harder to escape. Evil does not always ask for a declaration of allegiance. Sometimes it asks for help with a task, after which the person who helped discovers that the task has defined him.

Sotnikov’s resistance moves in the opposite direction. His capacity for action diminishes while his refusal becomes more complete. Actor Boris Plotnikov’s face, pale and increasingly stripped of ordinary expression, acquires the stillness of a religious image. Shepitko’s Christian associations are unmistakable, and the film’s title points toward an elevation that cannot be measured by military success. Within this occupied world, a man can be defeated without consenting to the terms of his defeat. The thought is powerful. It is also dangerous if we allow the beauty of its presentation to settle the question of what has been done to him.

The close-up is where that danger lives. On Sotnikov’s face, suffering begins to become legible as spiritual achievement. The camera gives us a way to recognize an integrity that the machinery of occupation cannot recognize. Yet the transformation risks making death feel completed, almost resolved. His persecutors destroy a person; cinema offers an image whose composure exceeds their power. We need that image because it refuses the perpetrators the final word. We should nevertheless be uneasy about needing it. A meaningful death is an expression the living can afford much more readily than the person required to die.

The Ascent: Rybak’s wide-eyed close-up. He plans to recover his principles once he is safe. The occupation keeps revising the timetable.

Shepitko does not allow this elevation to absorb everyone around Sotnikov. Other prisoners have attachments, fears, and obligations that do not arrange themselves into an exemplary narrative. A woman has children. A child’s presence makes the language of sacrifice harder to pronounce. Around the figure who can accept his fate stand people who have every reason to reject theirs. Their terror is not evidence of lesser humanity. It keeps the film from becoming a ceremony in which suffering receives its proper spiritual decoration. Whatever grace Sotnikov achieves belongs to him; it cannot be used to explain why anyone else should have been brought there.

Rybak remains indispensable to this distinction. His survival does not restore him to ordinary life, nor does it offer the simple satisfaction of watching a coward receive punishment. He has continued living at the cost of making his own existence difficult to inhabit. Vladimir Gostyukhin’s face keeps moving, searching for an opening in a situation that has closed around him. Beside Sotnikov’s stillness, this agitation can look like judgment. But it also forces an uncomfortable recognition. The wish to remain alive is not monstrous. The occupation has constructed circumstances in which an ordinary human desire can be made to serve monstrous ends.

What gives The Ascent its force is this refusal to let understanding become acquittal, or judgment become ease. We can follow Rybak’s reasoning and still see where it leads. We can admire Sotnikov and still hesitate before making his conduct a standard for everyone. The spectator has no shortage of excellent principles. Warmth and distance make them remarkably easy to maintain. Shepitko brings those principles into contact with a coughing body, an interrogator, a room from which there is no safe exit. The question becomes less flattering than whether we recognize courage. It becomes whether our admiration carries demands we ourselves have never had to meet.

The Ascent: The older prisoner in a sheepskin hat. An ordinary face, inconvenient to anyone proposing an extraordinary meaning for his death.

Tarkovsky approaches the same difficulty through a child who appears, at first, already equipped to meet those demands. Ivan, played by Nikolai Burlyayev, works as a scout. He is impatient with adult concern, fiercely purposeful, and determined to return to danger. His competence is part of the tragedy. A child able to function within a war has learned things no child should need to know. The officers’ affection for him cannot undo the structure in which they encounter him: He is both someone to protect and someone whose small body and determination have military value.

The title Ivan’s Childhood makes a claim that the waking story cannot fulfill. Childhood survives most abundantly in dreams: light, water, trees, a mother, the possibility of movement without a mission. These passages do more than establish an innocent past against which present horrors can be measured. They suggest another organization of experience. In a dream, the world can be touched without being inspected for threats. A surface can hold wonder. A mother’s presence requires no explanation. Returning to the military world feels like a change in the laws governing existence, even when the same elements—water and earth and trees—remain.

Tarkovsky’s beauty is therefore more troubling than the charge of beautifying war allows. His images preserve capacities that the war is destroying. Their elegance cannot be taken as evidence that destruction has improved the person subjected to it. Ivan’s severity belongs to the waking world; his openness belongs increasingly to another one. The film gives neither state a reassuring final authority. We cannot simply rescue him by insisting that the dreaming child is his true self. His anger is real, and so is his determination. Violence has entered the personality, making even the desire to protect him something he can experience as an obstruction.

Ivan’s Childhood: Ivan in a fur hat among ruins. The hat leaves room to grow. The war is less accommodating.

This is a particularly difficult form of loss because the child does not cooperate with our idea of innocence. He does not wait to be recognized as a victim. He wants action, revenge, responsibility. Adults may admire his bravery while regretting its necessity, and that combination can become a comfortable compromise: Sorrow supplies the moral credentials, and admiration allows the arrangement to continue. Tarkovsky makes it impossible to forget the life excluded by the arrangement. The dream passages are not a pleasant interval in the serious business of war. They disclose the serious business that war has displaced.

In Come and See, childhood undergoes a more visibly brutal transformation. Flyora, played by Aleksei Kravchenko, begins with an eagerness that contains adventure, vanity, and the wish to join the adult world. The film follows him through occupied Belarus until that world has become almost impossible to comprehend. His face changes with an extremity that seems to violate the passage of time. The features remain those of a boy, but the expression appears to have outlived the person who originally possessed them. We are looking at youth from which the expectation of a future has been forcibly removed.

Klimov makes the transformation sensory before it becomes an interpretation. After bombardment, sound is muffled and distorted; the world reaches Flyora through an injured capacity to receive it. Faces approach with an unnerving directness. Distances stretch, movement becomes arduous, and ordinary objects lose their stability. The viewer is deprived of the comprehensive understanding that war films often provide through maps, briefings, and alternating viewpoints. We do not get to rise above the confusion and appreciate the larger operation. The operation is happening to a boy whose nervous system has become the film’s measure of events.

Ivan’s Childhood: Ivan’s tight close-up. An impressive face for a scout. An appalling job description for a child.

Where The Ascent permits us to contemplate a face, Come and See can make looking feel like an assault. Flyora’s expression will not yield a manageable lesson. It records terror, disbelief, and a fatigue that should be impossible at his age. Calling him experienced would be grotesque. Calling him mature would mistake damage for development. Yet cinema has to show this transformation through the very resources that make a performance memorable: framing, duration, makeup, the actor’s extraordinary control. The ethical difficulty cannot be solved by making an ugly image. It persists inside the achievement, in our ability to admire how convincingly destruction has been rendered.

Klimov confronts that difficulty most fiercely in the sequence of a village’s destruction. The atrocity is accompanied by a hideous social energy: orders, laughter, gestures, posing. Perpetrators make a spectacle of their own power. This is important because cruelty here is not merely a breakdown of discipline or an eruption of primitive rage. It has an audience, a choreography, a collective permission. The people carrying it out can recognize one another, enjoy themselves, and produce images. The camera that exposes them must enter a world in which the making of an image has itself become part of the humiliation.

The film’s title consequently acquires an unpleasant doubleness. To see can mean to bear witness, but it can also mean to consume. Looking is no guarantee of moral seriousness. Nor is being overwhelmed. A viewer can endure a difficult film and leave with a small, private satisfaction at having endured it. We know the ritual. Someone describes a film as devastating; someone else says it is essential; eventually its difficulty becomes an attraction. Come and See makes this vocabulary feel insufficient. The question is what our attention owes to the people represented once the experience has ceased to be ours.

Shepitko and Klimov were married, a biographical fact that makes the relation between their films especially compelling. She died in a car accident in 1979, before Come and See was completed. It would be tempting to organize the films into an intimate exchange, her spiritual ascent answered by his descent into atrocity. But that would be too neat, and it would turn two independent artistic visions into roles assigned by a marriage. Their proximity is more useful when it sharpens their differences. Both make the face bear an intolerable pressure. They disagree, or seem to disagree, about what remains available within that pressure.

Even that disagreement must be qualified. The Ascent has terror that no spiritual reading can dissolve. Come and See contains a limit to the annihilating logic it depicts. Near its end, Flyora fires at an image of Hitler while archival history runs backward. The fantasy of reversing catastrophe reaches Hitler as an infant, where the boy’s firing stops. The sequence interrupts the wish to eradicate evil at its origin with the image of a child. It offers no repair to what Flyora has witnessed. But something in him still refuses the total logic of extermination. That refusal is fragile enough to resist being turned into a happy ending.

Across the three films, beauty has different work to do. Tarkovsky gives form to a world that a child should have been allowed to inhabit. Shepitko gives form to a refusal that violence cannot fully possess. Klimov gives form to an injury that exceeds the reassuring narratives available to describe it. None of these tasks is innocent. Beauty can preserve attention, and it can dignify what deserves our care; it can also encourage us to accept an intolerable event because its representation has achieved completeness. The films matter together because each unsettles the consolation another might appear to offer.

The distinction between honoring a person and redeeming an ordeal is easy to state, difficult to maintain. We want courage to mean something. We want the murdered to have resisted, the damaged to have retained humanity, the witness to have carried truth into the future. These wishes are decent until they become conditions attached to our sympathy. A person should not have to produce an exemplary response to catastrophe in order to remain worthy of attention. Nor should the spectator need to discover a spiritual dividend before acknowledging a loss. Sometimes what war leaves behind is a life diminished beyond any compensating revelation.

Come and See: Flyora held at gunpoint. The perpetrators would like a souvenir. Klimov supplies evidence.

That is why the faces in these films remain so difficult to put away. They do not give us the seasoned survivor whose authority makes the ordeal seem like a terrible education. Sotnikov, Rybak, Ivan, and Flyora leave us with incompatible possibilities: refusal, compromise, rage, endurance. Each belongs to a particular person, caught in circumstances that the word “war” can make falsely familiar. To look closely is to recover some of that particularity. A child had a mother. A man wanted to live. Another found a point beyond which he would not bargain. Whatever meaning we make of their faces, it must leave room for the lives they should have been able to lead.

Anton Levitsky was born in Minsk in 1978. He studied cinematography in Ljubljana, where his graduation film, a twelve-minute close-up of a retired railway inspector, was rejected for containing insufficient movement. He now lives in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, and writes about Soviet cinema, displacement, and the administrative life of melancholy. His book, “A Short History of Waiting for Someone to Return,” has been forthcoming since 2014. His passport photograph has been described as his most accessible work.

Cover image: Come and See: Flyora facing the camera. The film will end. His face offers no such assurance.