The story unfolds during the Second World War, in the Ukraine. A
12-year-old war orphan operating behind the German lines brings back
useful information to the Russian command post, where he is befrieded by
the commanding captain and his younger lieutenant. Together they debate
whether it is right to use the boy on similar dangerous missions in the
future; but Ivan's skill and enthusiasm eventually persuade them to send
him on one last journey...
Ivan's Childhood now stands as perhaps the finest achievement of
the still-underestimated Soviet New Wave of the 1958-65 'thaw' period; and
its Venice Festival award marked a second stage of international
recognition - after the Cannes prize for The Cranes Are Flying in 1958 -
that Soviet cinema was emerging from its long isolation.
Seen now, Ivan's Childhood may look more like a conventional
Soviet Great Patriotic War movie than it did in 1962 - innumerable details
seem in fact highly subversive of the genre - but it can scarcely avoid
being seen teleologically in the light of Tarkovsky's subsequent work.
Here, indeed, almost all his familiar motifs appear already (as many did
in his previous graduation film, The Steamroller and the Violin), and they
were clearly introduced by Tarkovsky. For instance, the original story
does not include anything like the episode of Ivan's running away from the
military HQ and falling asleep in a ruined house, to awake and be
questioned by a bewildered old man, which anticipates scenes from Andrei
Rublev and Stalker. Nor, for that matter, is Ivan's mother even mentioned
by Bogomolov: it is his father (characteristically not included in the
dreams by Tarkovsky, the autobiographical poet of absent fathers) who we
learn was killed serving as a border guard.
The remarkable scene in which Ivan 'plays' at war in the darkened
dugout is in fact a realisation of an ellipsis in the story, which
Tarkovsky develops to include an entirely enigmatic reference to Ivan's
experience in a Nazi death camp. And the final scenes in Berlin bear an
uncanny resemblance to the scenes of devastation in Stalker and The
Sacrifice, not to mention the finale of Klimov's Come and See. Elsewhere,
dripping water, apples, skeletal ruined buildings (a gutted church has
become the base camp), a book of Renaissance pictures - all these
introduce us to the iconography of the mature Tarkovsky. There is also
another invention to remind us of what the later Tarkovsky eliminated from
his films. Picking up on a brief episode in which Galtsev tries to upbraid
his new female medical officer, "a pretty trim-looking blonde of about
twenty...the close-fitting skirt hugging her strong hips...a bit too good
to look at" (Bogomolov's story is no literary masterpiece), and the
worldly wise Kholin comments crudely on her attractions, Tarkovsky and
Mikhail Papava created the remarkable forest interlude between Kholin and
Masha.
Here the striking, slightly clumsy but expressive geometry of camera
angle and body movement combine to suggest a simultaneous attraction and
ambivalence - a chaste eroticism of wartime chance encounter - which
Tarkovsky rarely attempted in later films (this is the sequence which
yielded the famous still of Kholin astride a trench embracing Masha). It
is an emotion better developed in Alexei Gherman's Twenty Days Without War
(a film admired by Tarkovsky) than in the generally self-effacing (or
neurotic) roles assigned to women in his work. In this, as in other
respects, the belated re-release of Ivan's Childhood should remind those
who resist the solemnity and religiosity of his last films that Tarkovsky
was, in 1962, already one of the most accomplished and exciting
film-makers in the world. Fittingly, his first feature begins with the
same image with which his last ended: a child and a tree.
-Ian
Christie, Monthly Film Bulletin, July 1988.
From
filmsociety.wellington.net.nz
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