L'enfance d'Ivan

Tarkovsky appeared dismissive of this, his first feature, saying it was the sort of project dreamed up in film school pool halls. It was not a film he himself instigated, but it cannot for a moment be described as uncommitted or pedestrian. It most closely resembles some of the other 'names' in purely artistic cinema of the day in terms of formal style, Tarkovsky having not at that point worked out his own unique and so far inimitable 'style', if that's the right word. The dream sequence with the apples, though brilliantly done, seems derivative. He never used optical flourishes like that again.

Tarkovsky believed a great deal of editing for the audience was vulgar and inimitable to great art, but this film is quite structured and conventional compared to his later slower and arguably more obscure works. The key performance comes from Ivan himself, a fine effort from one so young, and indeed Tarkovsky used him again in the bell section of Andrei Rublev; although he used rather harsh methods to get the performance he wanted in that case. Obviously influenced by Dreyer, you see the beginnings of Andrei's obsession with water and it's reflective calm around more tempestuous events. His use of black and white stock in terms of lighting is exemplary.

The film's title is ironic as Ivan does not have a childhood, but the films majestic and moving final shot suggests that Ivan does receive a kind of immortality beyond the bleak finality of his discovered photo in Berlin, that the Russian spirit itself cannot be stifled and will ultimately run free.

Like most films of Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, My Name is Ivan (a.k.a. Ivan's Childhood), reaches out to the spirit within us. Based on a short story titled "Ivan" by the Russian author Vladimir Bogomolov, My Name is Ivan is a bleak but deeply moving film about a 12-year old boy whose parents and sister were killed by the Germans and is now a scout (spy) for a Red Army battalion. Alternating between idyllic dreams of childhood, nightmares of revenge, and scenes of war devastation, Tarkovsky creates a uniquely personal exploration of the effects of war on the mind and spirit.

My Name is Ivan is set on the eastern front during World War II. Ivan's (Nikolai Burleyayev) size allows him to slip behind enemy lines and obtain vital strategic information about German positions for the Russians. Burleyayev, who later portrayed Boriska in the bell sequence in Andrei Rublev, gives a truly amazing performance as young Ivan. As the film opens, Ivan wakes up jarringly from a poetic dream of his mother and finds himself in the attic of an empty windmill. Dodging enemy fire, he swims across a muddy swamp to reach a Russian bunker where the ranking officer, Lieutenant Galtsev (Yevgeni Zharikov), questions his credentials.

Ivan is short-tempered and speaks to the Russian commanders with bravado unusual for someone of his age. The officers, however, take an interest in Ivan's welfare and provide him with love and protection. When they plan to send him to a military school, Ivan demands to be sent back to the front, seeking to revenge his parent's death. Unable to persuade his superiors, Ivan runs away but finds only desolation and returns to camp. Despite the officers' objections, Ivan is sent on another covert operation.

Tarkovsky shows us war but without bombs or glory or battle scenes -- only the suffering spirit of a child devastated by loss. As the film progresses, it becomes more and more an internal map of Ivan's mind. Haunted by the demons of approaching death, he seems to become emotionally inert. Tarkovsky said about the film (as quoted in amazon.com): "I attempted to analyze the condition of a person who is being affected by war. When personality is disintegrating then we have the collapse of the logical development, especially when we are dealing with the personality of a child. I always conceptualized Ivan as a destroyed personality pushed by the war from the normal axis of development."

Though an early film, Ivan presages Tarkovsky's later work with the use of hallucinatory camera work and very long takes where nothing happens for several minutes. Using dream sequences of normal life juxtaposed with mud-splattered reality, the film is suffused with an air of melancholy and longing. In a memorable dream sequence (supposedly lifted from Dovzhenko's "Earth") Ivan and his sister ride in a cart loaded with apples, in the words of Gregory Pearce, "reawakens within us the longing for the lost purity of childhood". This is one casualty of war not counted in the statistics.

This film by Tarkovsky depicts the story of Ivan, a child partisan in the eastern front during the second world war. The strength and immersion of the film are quite amazing, although it was made almost forty years ago it has not lost any of it's power and is still absolutely gripping. The dream sequences are especially powerful in the way they show the history and state of mind of the young Ivan.

The acting is very good and so are all the other aspects such as editing and cinematography that is exceptionally good. Overall the film is an example of directorial excellence, from a very simple story Tarkovsky is able to build a larger history with obvious references to christianity. Questions about humanity and the nature of humankind are in the center of this film and there are many reasons why this is one of the best war films that exist.

Ivan's Childhood, Andrei Tarkovsky's first substantial feature as director (he previously made a short of the Killers, and a 45 minute student film), is a near-masterpiece of adolescence shredded to pieces in subjective perception. It's set in world war 2, with 12 year old Ivan's family killed by the Nazis and his alliance with the Russian soldiers as a scout able to sneak past into small spaces more to do with vengeance than real patriotism. By the time we see him he's a torn figure, someone who at 12 looks and acts like he's already come of age, by force, and that this deep down has left him in a disparaging state of mind, pushing it away through temper (he won't go to military school, he tells his superiors), and only with the slightest escape through dreams.

But in these dreams he's also tormented by his past, in fragments that hint to the psychological trauma through abstractions, of a splash of water hitting across the dead body of his mother while Ivan is at the bottom of a well, or in the natural and happy surroundings of a truck carrying fruits. One sees in this the only spots of innocence left in Ivan's life, the pinnacle (and one of Tarkovsky's most breathtaking scenes ever filmed) the final dream on the beach with Ivan and his sister running along the sand. In this nature, smiling faces, the filtering of the background of the forest, Ivan's Childhood is starkly incredible.

The 'real' world as depicted, to be sure, is jagged, torn apart, in dark marshes and forests and with trenches dug for a long while and flares and cannon fire always in the air. It seems almost not to be entirely real, or as real as should be 100% truthful to battlefronts. But it's also, for the most part (sometimes it shifts to the adult soldiers like Kholin and Galtzev), through Ivan's point of view, and so this world around him that is ripped to shreds and bullet-strewn and deadened is amplified a little.

There's a curious, evocative scene where Ivan, left alone in a dark floor of a house with a flashlight, goes around looking at the messages scribbled frantically as final notes from partisans, and it veers in-between dream and reality, where it could go either way depending on Ivan's mental state, as fragile as his physical condition. He finally bursts into tears, exhausted. It's this wild meddling with what Ivan sees or experiences or thinks and secretly fears through his would-be tough exterior that makes him so compelling and heartbreaking, as played by Kolya Burlyayev with a sharp level of bravery- not even Jean-Pierre Leaud was this absorbing, albeit on different dramatic terrain.

It's a given that it was not Tarkovsky's project to start with, and, ala Kubrick and Spartacus, came in after a director had been let go to finish the picture. While it is remarkable to see how Tarkovsky does make it his vision, and quite an ambitious one considering how expansive the production design gets and the technical daring taken with his director of photography Vadim Yusov, and how there's a fresh and often original (eg dream scenes, placement of the camera, the scene in the post-war house looking at the records of the departed) perspective that no one else would have given it, there are small parts of the story that could have been dealt with a little better, edited, or cut out altogether.

The character of Masha (played practically with one expression- practically cause of the moment after she is kissed- on her face) is a little unnecessary, or rather more of a means for Tarkovsky to practice some technical ideas in the forest scene, which really leads nowhere, and how her reemergence later in the film also doesn't serve much of a purpose. Maybe there's a point to be made about women in the army at the time, as she's an object of desire less much of an effective nurse, but when seeing her scenes (which aren't bad exactly) one wants to get back to Ivan and the central plot.

But, as mentioned, one has to know that as a Tarkovsky picture what doesn't work doesn't matter so much as what does, and Ivan's Childhood is often staggering in its depiction of the brutality on the mind and consciousness, not just through Ivan but through his adult counterparts, and about how in a time when life can be taken away in an instant, almost without a sound, clinging to a past, however surreal, is all that can matter. There's truths reached about the devastation of war on the young, and those who care for them, that wouldn't be in a more naturalistic setting, and it's Tarkovsky's triumph that he steers it into the realm of a consistent, poetic nightmare narrative.

Ivan's Childhood is a pretty masterful example of editing, cinematography, acting, direction, and pretty much everything else that's right about film. Unfortunately, the drama or suspense is not very gripping.

This is as simple as I can put it. Film buffs will probably love this movie. It's crafted like a work of art. The average moviegoer will probably be bored during the film.

This film kind of defies convention and rating. I thought it was well- made, I just thought it wasn't very engaging.