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Elem Klimov Biography

Elem Germanovich Klimov, whose first name is an acronym of Engels, Lenin and Marx, was born into a communist family in Stalingrad on 9^th July 1933.   When he was a young boy, he was evacuated from the city during the Battle of Stalingrad and forced to cross the Volga on a makeshift raft with his mother and baby brother.   It was a memory that would haunt him throughout his life and upon which he would draw when writing and directing his final film, Idi i smotri (Come and See) in 1985.   ‘As a young boy, I had been in hell,’ he would later recall.   ‘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 [the film]’.

Klimov attended Moscow’s Higher Institute of Aviation, from which he graduated in 1957.   He briefly switched to a career in journalism before enrolling with the state film school, VGIK, where he studied under director Efim Dzigan, whose most notable work was We Are From Kronstadt (1936).   His fellow students at this time included such subsequently famous names as Andrei Tarkovsky, Andrei Konchalevsky and Vasily Shukshin, and it was while studying at VGIK that Klimov met his future wife, Larisa Shepitko, who would also become a director.   His graduate film, a short comedy called Zhenikh (The Groom), was projected on the walls of the institute.

Klimov’s debut film was another comedy – all his early films, until the untimely death of his wife Larisa, were comedies, while all those that followed her demise were tragedies.   Dobro pozhlovat', ili postoronnim vkhod vospreshchen (Welcome or No Trespassing) was released in 1964.   Simply choosing to work in comedy in Soviet Russia at that time was a bold move: comedy as a genre avoided Soviet communist ideology, and thus risked being seen as a challenge to it, a paradox that resulted in Soviet censors paying particularly close attention to comedy films.

Dobro pozhlovat', ili postoronnim vkhod vospreshchen, which was written by Semyon Lungin and Ilia Nusinov, was a satire on Soviet bureaucracy set in a children’s summer camp run by a tyrannical director named Dynin (Evgeny Evstigneev).   When mischievous 11-year-old Kostia Inochkin repeatedly breaks Dynin’s draconian rules he is expelled from the camp but, fearful of the effect his expulsion will have on his gran, Kostia sneaks back into the camp and is concealed by the other children and staff members.   The film was a satire on Soviet bureaucracy, and Mosfilm Studio were nervous about how it would be received.   Klimov recalled, ‘Every morning I would ask the accountant in charge of our money how much we had spent, and would then try to spend more, because the more we had spent, the less likely they were to close us down.’  His fears were realized when he received a telegram from the studio while filming on location on the Black Sea to stop immediately and return to Moscow.   Fortunately, he had already shot most of the film, and was able to complete filming before returning, where he was greeted by a cabal of nervous studio executives.

 Although the film was passed by the Komsomol (Young Communist League) who ran the Pioneer Camps on which the summer camp in the film is based, it was briefly banned by the censors because it was considered an insult to the party.    Critics who had seen the film condemned it, one of them for the ‘lack of discipline’ in the camp.   According to Klimov, the fate of the film was assured by no less than the Soviet premier, Nikita Kruschev, who saw and liked the film, and asked why it wasn’t on release in cinemas.

 Klimov’s next film was Pokhozhdeniya zubnogo vracha (Adventures of a Dentist), released in 1965, in which a novice dentist discovers he has a knack for quickly and painlessly pulling teeth, a skill which is at first admired by his colleagues, but then derided when it affects their own business.   The patients he wins are then quick to turn on him when his skill begins to falter.   The implication in the story – that society ostracises the gifted – led the censor to demand changes, but Klimov refused.   As a result the film was awarded only a ‘category three’ classification, which meant that it was only shown in somewhere between 25 and 78 cinemas (according to conflicting sources), meaning very few people in the USSR actually got to see the film.

 Klimov's next film Agoniya (Agony), about Rasputin and the last days of the Romanov dynasty, took nine years to complete, going through several re-writes in the process, and then sat on the shelf for a further ten years because of its’ portrait of Tsar Nicholas II and for its’ orgy scenes (the film was released in western Europe in 1981).   It was only during the era of glasnost that the film would finally be released.   Following his completion of Agoniya, Klimov, together with Marlen Khutsiev, completed I vse-taki ia veriu (And Still I Believe), the film his teacher Mikhail Romm had been working on when he died.

 In 1979 Klimov’s wife Larisa Shepitko died in a car crash while working on Proshchanie (Farewell) an adaptation of Valentin Rasputin’s Farewell to Matyora.   Klimov completed the film in 1981 – although it was shelved for some time due to its ‘desperate ecological warning.’   He also directed a short tribute to his wife, called Larisa.   Her death would have a profound impact on Klimov that would colour the rest of his life and lead him to seek solace in alcohol.

His final film, Idi, I smotri (Come and See) released in 1985, is his most personal and won acclaim around the world and the Golden Prize at the Moscow International Film Festival.   Based on a story by Ales Adamovich, it depicts the horrific experiences of Florian (Alexei Kavchenko), a 15-year-old member of the resistance in occupied Belarus in 1943.   The film’s intensity is enhanced by Alfred Schnittke’s score and Klimov’s unerring ability to force the viewer to experience all that Florian experiences through the innovative use of visual and aural stimuli.

Idi I smotri was to be Klimov’s last film, although he was interested in a number of projects that never got off the ground.   Despite offers of financial assistance from America, a film based on Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, a satire on life in Stalinist Russia, failed to materialize.   Similarly, plans for a biopic of Joseph Stalin and an adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Devils were also thwarted.

 In 1986, with perestroika heralding the beginning of sweeping changes throughout all aspects of Russian life, Klimov was elected by his colleagues to be the First Secretary of the Filmmakers’ Union.   He was seen as a ‘strong figure capable of leading the film industry out of a debilitating state of stagnation. Many also identified with his longtime struggle [...] for the right to freedom of artistic expression.’   While in office, he oversaw the release of almost one hundred films that had previously been banned, and the re-instatement of a number of directors who had fallen out of favour with the old guard.   In 1988, Klimov handed over the reins to Andrei Smirnov, saying he wished to make more films.   However, the films failed to materialize and in 2000, he said, ‘I've lost interest in making films. Everything that was possible I felt I had already done. I think of lines written by Andrei Platonov to his wife, 'Toward the impossible our souls fly.'

Elem Klimov died on 26^th October 2003 after six weeks in a coma following a stroke.

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