Elem Klimov

Personal life

Elem Klimov was born in Stalingrad (now Volgograd) into a Russian family of German Stepanovich Klimov, an investigator who worked at the Central Control Commission of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and Kaleria Georgievna Klimova. His parents were staunch communists and his first name was an acronym derived from the names of Engels, Lenin and Marx. Nevertheless, his brother German Klimov stated that his name comes from Elam Harnish — a character of the Burning Daylight novel by Jack London, since their mother was a fan of his. During the Battle of Stalingrad, he, his mother and his baby brother were evacuated from their home and crossed the Volga on a makeshift raft. Klimov would later draw on these experiences for his 1985 film Come and See.

In 1957, Klimov graduated from the Higher Institute of Aviation in Moscow. He considered a career in journalism before settling on cinema. He enrolled at the state film school, VGIK, where he studied under acclaimed director Efim Dzigan. While a student at the institute, Klimov met Larisa Shepitko, whom he would later marry. In 1983, he was a member of the jury at the 33rd Berlin International Film Festival.

He died in October 2003 from brain hypoxia after six weeks in a coma. He was buried at the Troyekurovskoye Cemetery.

Film career

Klimov's first feature film, the 1964 Welcome, or No Trespassing (known in the UK as No Holiday for Inochkin) was a satire on Soviet bureaucracy in the guise of a children's summer camp adventure story. The film was briefly banned, having been deemed an insult to the Party; however, the ban was rescinded after Khrushchev had a private viewing and authorised its release.

Klimov's second film, Adventures of a Dentist (1965), was a dark (and in some ways Tatiesque) comedy about a dentist who is derided (and eventually has his life ruined) by his colleagues for his natural talent of painlessly pulling out teeth. The implication, that society inevitably ostracizes those that are gifted, horrified the censors who told Klimov to change it. When Klimov refused, the film was given the lowest classification, "category three", which meant that it was shown in only 25–78 movie theatres.

Next, Klimov began making a film about Rasputin called Agony. The road to screening took him nine years and many rewrites. Although finished in 1975, the final edit was not released in the USSR until 1985, due to suppressive measures partly because of its orgy scenes and partly because of its relatively nuanced portrait of Tsar Nicholas II. It had been shown in western Europe a few years before. In 1976, Klimov finished a film begun by his teacher Mikhail Romm before the latter's death called And Still I Believe....

In 1979, Klimov's wife Larisa Shepitko died in a car accident while directing an ecological fable based on a famous novel by Valentin Rasputin called Farewell to Matyora. A year after her death Klimov filmed a 25-minute tribute to his wife entitled Larisa (1980), then went on to finish the film she had started. Despite being shelved for two years after completion, Farewell was eventually released in 1983.

His wife's death had a profound impact on Klimov—all his films after this time were tragedies. His next film, Come and See, was released in 1985 to worldwide acclaim and won the Golden Prize at the 14th Moscow International Film Festival. The film depicts the experiences of a 15-year-old boy joining the resistance in Nazi-occupied Belarus in 1943. Speaking of how the film drew on his own childhood experience of the war, Klimov said, "As a young boy, I had been in hell... Had I included everything I knew and shown the whole truth, even I could not have watched it."

In 1986, fresh from the success of Come and See, and with the changes brought by perestroika in the air, Klimov was chosen by his colleagues to be the First Secretary of the Filmmakers' Union following the V Congress of the Soviet Filmmakers. During the congress all previous heads of the Filmmakers' Union — including Lev Kulidzhanov, Sergei Bondarchuk, Stanislav Rostotsky and others — were overthrown in favour of "liberal" activists. According to some critics and filmmakers, the congress was conducted by Alexander Yakovlev, one of the grey cardinals of Perestroika who was unofficially presented there, consulting the activists from time to time.

His reign saw the belated release of many of the previously banned films and the reinstatement of several directors who had fallen out of political favour. At the same time, this period is widely considered as the start of decline of the Soviet cinema and the rise of the so-called chernukha (a slang term, a mix of words "black" and "porn", see chernukha in Russian Wikipedia), or an ultra-realistic portrait of Soviet realities always showed in a highly negative light. However, Klimov was frustrated by the obstacles that still remained in his way and gave up his post in 1988 to Andrei Smirnov, saying that he wanted to make films again. Klimov did not complete any further films after Come and See. In 2000, he declared, "I've lost interest in making films. Everything that was possible I felt I had already done."

Filmography