Director not afraid to take on the Soviet authorities

Russian film director Elem Klimov, who has died aged 70 after six weeks in a coma, was only ever able to make five features, …

Russian film director Elem Klimov, who has died aged 70 after six weeks in a coma, was only ever able to make five features, the last of which, Come And See (1985), is among the most devastating of war films.

There were various reasons for the ending of his career. The rapidly changing political climate in Russia and its repercussions on cultural policy buffeted Klimov, who became first secretary of the Soviet Filmmakers' Union during a noisy congress in May 1986. The old guard were replaced by a younger, democratically elected contingent, most of whom, like Klimov, had had problems with state censors; filmmakers in the vanguard of Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika.

Although films were freed from the yoke of state control, Klimov, hindered at every turn, failed in his attempts to establish a new, vibrant cinema and to reissue the great films of the Soviet era and he resigned his post after two years. He was frustrated in his attempts to make a film based on The Master And Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov's fantastical satire of life in Stalinist Russia, despite financial propositions by American producers. He also had a project for a film on Stalin and for an adaptation of Dostoevsky's The Devils, but three years ago, at the age of 67, he declared: "I've lost interest in making films."

In 1979, his wife, director Larissa Shepitko, was killed in a car accident. She and Klimov met at the VGIK, the state film institute in Moscow, in the early 1960s, when directors were trying to move from socialist realism towards more intimate tales about the individual's role in society.

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Born in Stalingrad into a communist family, Klimov graduated from Moscow's Higher Institute of Aviation in 1957. He switched to journalism before entering the VGIK. His first feature was Welcome, or No Trespassing (1964), a satire involving a troublesome boy at a summer camp who is expelled by the martinet camp director. Because the boy's granny was a dead ringer for Khrushchev, the film was not shown at first. However, Khrushchev later saw it, liked it and authorised its release.

Klimov's whimsical The Adventures Of A Dentist (1965) was also blocked for a while by the authorities, who saw the story of a dentist whose gift of extracting teeth painlessly made him an object of derision among less talented colleagues as being critical of the way in which "special" Soviet artists were treated.

His third feature, Agony, an epic set during the final days of the Romanov era, took nine years to make and then spent 10 more on the shelf before being released in 1975. The pre-glasnost Soviet authorities balked at the orgies and at what they saw as a sympathetic portrayal of the doomed tsar. Farewell (1981), begun in 1979 by his wife Shepitko, reflected on the dilemma of the price paid for progress when a village in Siberia is to be destroyed and its peasant community is resettled in a development of faceless apartment blocks.

Come And See has been described as "an epic of derangement". Klimov drew on his own childhood for the film. "As a young boy, I had been in hell," he explained. He and his mother and baby brother were evacuated on a raft across the Volga river during the battle of Stalingrad. "Had I included everything I knew and shown the whole truth, even I could not have watched it."

It was Klimov's last work and testament.

Elem Klimov, film director, born July 9th, 1933; died October 26th, 2003.