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| Nickolai Burlyayev and Evgeny Zharikov |
Andrei Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood, from 1962, is a striking debut feature. The film is set, primarily, in the western USSR during World War 2. The main character is a twelve year old orphan who seeks vengeance against the invading Germans by joining the partisans. His thirst for revenge is so great that he has escaped a boarding school he was put into to serve at the front. The film shifts back and forth between Ivan's experiences during the war contrasted with memories, dreams, and reflections of Ivan's peaceful and pastorale past.
The landscape of the warfront is ravaged and macabre, an alienated environment. Ivan's Childhood has some of the standard elements of a Soviet film about what they still call The Great Patriotic War, but films by Tarkovsky look like no other. The full panoply of nature is always on display: from fertility to destruction, but shot as if by a metaphysical poet. Tarkovsky and cinematographer Vadim Yusov's compositions are always beautiful, but they are also disorienting. The vastness of the natural world, whether on earth or in space, is overwhelming for his characters. The images in Ivan's Childhood, whether they be of a crashed plane or a truck hauling apples in the rain. are defamiliarized. Tarkovsky's style is similar to the concept of Ostranenie or "making strange", as coined by Victor Shklovsky. The palpable textures of the imagery in Ivan's Childhood follow Shklovsky's dictum that in art "a stone must be stony."
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| Burlyayev and Irma Raush |
Alas, film is more than the sum of its images, for some elements of the film's screenplay succumb to trite cliches. The barely sketched love triangle feels more like a commercial concession than a necessary element. Also, Ivan's devotion to the cause feels too super human. It is this element that led Jonas Mekas to denounce the flick in the Village Voice as "a fascist movie." Now Mekas, who was born in Lithuania and was imprisoned by the Nazis for his troubles, may have been overly sensitive when he encountered propaganda produced in countries headed by authoritarian regimes, but that was his right. Ivan's Childhood originated as a short story by Vladimir Bogomolov. It went through many iterations on its way to the big screen. Bogomolov was involved at every stage and there was much wrangling over the scenario. Future filmmaker Andrei Konchalovsky, who plays a bespectacled soldier, was one of the many credited and uncredited screenwriters.
Spoiler Alert
The prime bone of contention during production was over the film's ending and I admit I have some misgiving over the final sequence. In the original story, Ivan survives the war. In the film, a Lieutenant who had befriended him finds his file, which indicates Ivan has been executed for being a partisan, while rummaging through the Nazi chancellory in defeated Berlin. Afterwards, we are treated to shots of torture devices used by the Gestapo. Shots from Soviet documentary units of Berlin in ruins feel tacked on as does ghoulish footage of the charred remains of Joseph Goebbels and the corpses of his children, poisoned by Goebbels and his Frau. It didn't sit well with me and I imagine the same was true with Mr. Mekas. Still, Ivan's Childhood has many moments that foretell an extraordinary career from Tarkovsky.
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