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IVAN’S
CHILDHOOD
7/10
(Ivanovo
Detstvo)
USSR
1962
Andrei
Tarkovsky
95
mins
Even
before the first frame of his first feature, Tarkovsky asserts
himself as a subversive artist, asserts his total control of sound and
image. The ‘Mosfilm’ statue of two heroic figures appears, arms thrusting
forward into a glorious future of state-approved Soviet cinema - and we
hear a cuckoo cry. It’s one of the few touches of humour in a harrowing,
stark, difficult, but rewarding wartime fable.
Next
: Ivan (Kolya Burlyayev) by a tree, his eyes riveted to a spider’s web.
He moves off, but the camera doesn’t directly follow him - it rises
up the tree, up the thin grey trunk, all the way to the top, while Ivan
retreats the middle distance, at ease in his peaceful, seductive rural
idyll. A fantasy. Soon he wakes to his horrific reality, as a spy on the
devastated Russian/German front. He wades across a treacherously swampy
river to a command post, where he convinces a skeptical Lieutenant Galtsev
(E.Zharikov) that he isn’t just a stray peasant kid - he’s a key pawn
in the vast strategy of war.
Nothing
much actually happens: Ivan is told he’s to be sent to military academy,
away from the front; he refuses; female medic Masha (V.Malyavina) spurs
the interest of both reserved, youthful Galtsev and brash, older Holin
(V. Zubkov); Holin and Galtsev set out on a dangerous mission, with Ivan
in tow... Tarkovsky places at least as much emphasis on Ivan’s inner
existence - he gives us regular, privileged glimpses of the boy’s
dreams, his memories of a family murdered by the Nazis. It’s these visions,
at once comforting and tormenting, which power his waking hours, his thirst
for revenge.
Adapted
from an apparently undistinguished short story by Vladimir Bogolov, Ivan’s
Childhood is in many ways typical of the approved school of heroic
post-war Russian film-making. But Tarkovsky’s ambition is unmistakeable,
as is his disinterest in conventional expectations of narrative. The ‘action’
is often hard to follow; the Masha subplot, though striking agreeably
touching notes of tentative romance, feels extraneous - an excuse for
Tarkovsky to concoct a unique cinematic embrace as, in a wintry treescape,
Holin pauses as he carries Masha over a trench, his two feet on either
bank, Masha’s dangling in midair, their kiss tantalisingly invisible above
the screen’s upper limit.
 Although
there was, presumably, nothing ‘holy’ about the Russians’ ‘Great Patriotic
War’, Tarkovsky shoots his movie like a religious epic. He has the the
Russians use a ruined church as their base, allowing him glimpses of shattered
icons looking on as wiry crosses tilt in the cold, smoky light. There’s
the constant implication of (or search for) some ‘higher’ order behind
the chaos of earthy horrors. Ivan’s dreams reveal the boy’s transcendent
relationship with idealised nature - reality’s wasteland all the more
unbearably wrong, as wrong as a cockerel kept on a leash... As
in his later films, Tarkovsky’s poetry is of fire and water - the soundtrack
alternates the sound of dripping rain with the distant calls of unseen
birds.
But
whose story is this? If Tarkovsky’s approach to plot is offhand (and it
is), this does open up his film to looser interpretation of themes. The
original story was simply entitled ‘Ivan’ - but Tarkovsky emphasises the
childhood - a previous state - as glimpsed in the dreams. Though
Ivan is ‘about 12,’ war has accelerated his development. He’s at least
the equal of the men we see (it’s no accident he shares his name with
a Major) - which makes Burlyayev’s ferocious performance all the more
remarkable - he’s also incredible in Tarkovsky’s next film, Andrei
Rublev. Ivan thinks nothing of telling the men what to do, and they,
eventually, think nothing, of following his ‘orders.’ But Ivan’s Childhood
is arguably as much Galtsev’s story. The film begins with Ivan entering
Galtsev’s territory - as the lieutenant sleeps - and the main plot ends
with him leaving it. We then zoom forward to Berlin, with the war won
and Galtsev among the ruins of the Nazi administration. He sees a photograph
of Ivan, and the film ends with a final vision of the lad’s dreams. At
the very least, the whole film is Galtsev’s reminiscence - it’s possibly
his fantasy, his idealised version of a heroic wartime tale, his movie.
And
it’s intriguing just how very cinematic Ivan’s dreams are. Each
involves some kind of special effect, some piece of startlingly innovative
camera trickery. In the first, Ivan performs a subtly gravity-defying
crane shot through the trees. Later, he sees himself on the back of a
horse-drawn cart full of apples, and the countryside behind is developed
in negative. These reveries do veer towards the sentimental - his mother’s
brow-wiping gesture is entirely phoney, while the music is too often heavy-handed
and repetitive. But just as you begin to draw back from Tarkovsky’s rough
edges, he delivers a knockout blow. Is there a more lyrical vision in
the whole of cinema, for instance, than then when the cart spills its
impossibly vast load of apples, which spread across the road, which transforms
into a beach, which is then grazed by wild horses, nuzzling each apple
in turn?
8th
January 2001
by Neil Young
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