L'enfance d'Ivan

The first full-length feature film by the great Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky caused a sensation when it was released and shown at Venice Film Festival in 1962 where it won the Golden Lion. The world had not seen such a powerful motion picture about war and what it does to the youngest and weakest - the children. It is a bleak, haunting and horrifying portrait of lost innocence and the childhood that was interrupted the very day the boy's family was murdered. Although Ivan survived physically, he was changed forever, not a boy but a man who looked in the eye of triumphant death and horror. The film introduces young Nikolai (Kolya) Burlyaev in the fascinating performance as Ivan. "Ivan's Childhood" is a screen adaptation of the story by a Russian writer Vladimir Bogomolov "Ivan" which is a fiction story but it is based on the real facts. Millions young boys and girls perished during the endless days, months, and years of the worst war of the last century. Bogomolov fought as a soldier during the WWII. He was only 15 years old but he had forged his papers - added two years, dropped from his school and joined the Army. He had been seriously wounded three times but survived and finished the war in Berlin - the 19 year old soldier with six medals for courage and heroism. He was a very good writer and I love his books "Moment of Truth" ("In the August of 1944"), and "Zosya" that were also adapted to very good movies in Russia.

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.

"Childhood of Ivan" is not only about Ivan's life but it stands as a symbol for the many Russian lives shattered by the war. This is an elliptical film, that is, it doesn't reveal everything - it suggests.

"Childhood of Ivan" requires the use of your brain and imagination, but it is in no way a difficult film. Once you accept not understanding everything right now, just relax and follow the images and sounds and you are ready for the "Childhood of Ivan".

As I said before the film uses many ellipses to show Ivan's fractured life - he plays in the fields, his mother calls him and smiles; a water well, he stares down at the water and his mother stands beside him and tells a story about the stars; we hear a gun shot, someone lying on the grass; Ivan is wading through a swamp to reach a soviet army unit.

The war is not shown at all - it is suggested. We only see the enemy soldiers once for a brief moment. And two hanged men is all there is to denounce the carnage of the war. The rest is suggested by unfinished speeches, by faces where pain is followed right after by the desire to live and be happy......

Ivan's memories: His mother, his sister and their games, the beach, the sea and the rain, his captivity - his life, a broken life. Nothing remained for him in life but to fight - to fight against the enemy that had taken everything from him.

I repeat that "Childhood of Ivan" is not a partisan film, it doesn't try to demonize the adversaries. I would call it much more an intimist film, somewhat in the vein of "Les Jeux Interdits", but Ivan's childhood was over after the horrors he had to go through; his only way to survive as a human being was to fight the horror that had crippled his life, while the children of "Les Jeux Interdits" went on with their children games in spite of the war. France, because of her fast surrender, was preserved from the butchery inflicted on the Soviet Union.

I recommend this film to everyone who wants to see a paradoxically sad, beautiful, reflexive and passionate film.

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.

Tarkovsky's monochrome delight deals with the tragedy of youth lost in war. Its main theme is of childhood innocence lost (becoming accessible to Ivan only in dreams) however the young officers are also vastly aged by the conflict they find themselves in.

The backdrop is nature itself - woodpeckers and cuckoos emulate (or become replaced by) the sounds of machine gun fire and the hoots of the falling flares. It pervades most scenes: the seemingly endless channel of water between the opposing sides, the huge birch trees stretching out as high and as far as the eye can see while also providing bunkers for the Russian forces. But nature's power is continually challenged by the great war going on around it and is ultimately defiled and devastated (like Ivan's, and the other young officers' innocence) - turning from green grasslands to mud and ashen trees.

Reminded me of 'The Thin Red Line' in its use of the natural world war tries to ignore. The shots are honestly stunning. The leads are all fantastic. Enjoy the desolation.