Tarkovsky Season: Ivan's Childhood (Dir Andrei Tarkovsky, 1h 34 m, 1962)

 

 "Relating a person to the whole world: that is the meaning of cinema"

Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time (1986).

A new year, and on we go, in what I hope will be the first of many seasons looking at a single director's work. In the case of some directors, we must, sadly, be selective, focusing down upon a particular period of time, or pick and choose between highlights. That we can fit the entire filmography of a cinematic titan such as Andrei Tarkovsky into two months (January and July), with room to spare, is not only a blessing, but a poignant reminder of a life cut short, of films unmade. Across just twenty four years, Tarkovsky's seven films span from the stark depiction of war that opens his career in Ivan's Childhood, to the hugely influential Solaris and Stalker, films that pushed science fiction from mere entertainment to vehicles to discuss weighty concepts such as death, the human condition, and the very nature of cinema's coming of age as mature artform, to confronting his own mortality, his self-imposed exile from his native Russia, and the existence of God in his final film, The Sacrifice. Throughout these beautiful, perfectly shot films come these moments of stillness, of the avant-garde long-shot, of the dream, of the un-reality that tinge every film Tarkovsky ever made.

Let's wind the clock back. By the time that Tarkovsky, having endured a difficult childhood that colours his most autobiographical of films, Mirror, and dropped out of college to become a prospector, returned to Moscow to join the State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK), being admitted to its film direction program in 1954, Soviet Cinema was approaching its fourth decade. I've already spoken about the film that kickstarted it (Battleship Potemkin), but by this point, with Khrushchev’s plan of De-Stalinisation of the country leading to a thaw between the USSR and the West, so this was reflected in its cinema in three crucial ways. 

Firstly, with the VGIK at its forefront, an older guard of established film makers were beginning to give way to a younger group. This included Georgiy Daneliya, whose film Walking the Streets of Moscow represents, in its focus upon the everyday life of Soviet citizens, in its move away from the social realism towards the artistic, the archetypical cinema of this thaw in Russian art. Secondly, hand-in-hand with this, cinema as a medium in the USSR became a more artistic medium as a whole-no longer was it weighed down by its chief role of being state propaganda-and indeed this experimentalism was actively encouraged. Avant-garde, visually stunning and experimental films erupt from Soviet Cinema like flowers from tundra, and nowhere is this seen better than in Serjei Parajanov's The Colour of Pomegranates.

Here, Parajanov depicts the life of Armenian singer/bard Sayat-Nova is explored in nigh-wordless, dreamlike tableaux, that practically become cinematical paintings. Not only is this regarded, rightly, as one of the greatest film ever made, but it is a perfect example of Soviet Cinema at its most experimental, at its most abstract and dreamlike, characteristics that turn up again and again in the work of Tarkovsky. Cinema becomes, in a word more visually and narratively ambitious.

But perhaps most crucial is the USSR's thawing with other countries artistically, and this proves to be crucial for Tarkovsky and his peers at the VGIK. A limited flow of American and European films, books, and music enter, Picasso exhibits at the Hermitage, and with this influx, comes Italian Neorealism, directors like Bunuel, Bergman, Kurosawa, and perhaps most crucially for the young Tarkovsky, Andrzej Wajda, whose film, Ashes and Diamonds (1958)'s visual impact can be seen reflected in Ivan's Childhood itself. Not only this but Soviet cinema can be seen to flow outwards-Mikael Kalatozov's The Cranes are Flying, a sublime example of the changing sensibilities of Soviet cinema in the turning of the Great Patriotic War from propaganda to focus on the women broken and isolated by war, being the sole Soviet film ever to win the Palme D'or.

Back to Andrei himself. By 1962, he has graduated from VGIK, his graduation project, The Steamroller and the Violin, co-written by his long-time collaborator, Andrei Konchalovsky, matching the social realism of everyday life in Moscow with dreamlike sequences depicting the unlikely friendship between a young boy and a steamroller driver also adding Vadim Yusov, Tarkovsky's cameraman for Ivan and Andrei Rublev to the group. By this time, Tarkovsky has also married, his first wife Irma Rausch performing two key roles in these first two films, most notably as Ivan's mother in Ivan's Childhood. That Tarkovsky even makes Ivan is a mixture of his early success with The Steamroller... and the failure of Ivan's original director, the young Eduard Abalov, leading to the entire project being canned and Tarkovsky starting again from scratch.

Ivan is, thus, at once archetypal Tarkovsky and atypical of his style. In later years, despite the praise of figures as disparate as Bergman and Jean Paul Sartre, and overall critical and financial success, he felt the film lacking. Despite this, it is a nigh-perfect prototype of his poetic, passionate style, with the central figure of Ivan (Nikolai Burlyayev) a performance that is at once a human face to the chaos and violence and death of war, and a stubbornly human figure, at once a doomed youth and an avatar-with parts of Ivan based on Tarkovsky's own war experiences. Through Ivan's dreams, so we are transported to days of innocence that only further jar and jolt against moments of reality, of mundane, stark war, in a way that Soviet Cinema would not attempt against until the searing, disturbing retort to Ivan of 1985's Come and See (dir. Elem Klimov).

Ivan's Childhood, thus, is a film of two parts. At its centre, there is a degree of the Italian Neo-Realism-one cannot help but compare the war-torn Russian countryside to that of the destroyed Rome in Rome, Open City or Ashes and Diamonds. Here, Tarkovsky's camera follows Burlyayev and the three soldiers that accompany him through much of the film (Kholin, Galtsev and Gryaznov, played by Valentin Zubkov, Evgeny Zharikov and Nikolai Grinko) in elongated takes, that slowly sweep over the destroyed landscape, from the beginning, where . Here, in broad brushstrokes, Tarkovsky adapts the Vladimir Bogomolov short story; Ivan is a young boy orphaned by war, who now acts as a scout for the Russian army who arrives at an outpost, having been captured, and, having convinced Galtsev of who he is, soon summons Kholin and Gryaznov, who prepare him for his next mission.

But even here, in this world of chaos and war, Tarkovsky's style begins to permeate this otherwise rather rote depiction of war-certainly, of his film, this remains the one that he had the most regrets about. There is, midway through the film, a stark moment, wherein, having run away, the film takes on a surreal quality, with Ivan meeting the figure of an old man who has clearly been driven mad by loss as he stumbles through his memories, trying to hang a soviet tract on the wall, and searching for a nail-here, the influence of Wajda is clear, not only in the way that Tarkovsky uses light, but also in the framing of several shots, most notably in the framing of Ivan in the wreckage of a house in which the beams seem to cut into the frame, stabbing toward the boy in the centre of them.

The horrors of war, however, and their effect on the young boy, are best seen in one harrowing, stunning sequence-never is Burlyayev more superb, never is that delicate balancing act between the boy soldier and the vulnerable, damaged child more notable. Here, Ivan comes across the scratched final messages of prisoners of the Germans-the barracks that Galtsev and his men inhabit once controlled by them. Here, Tarkovsky starkly, perfectly overlays the panicked audio of young men like Ivan, as the boy turns to vengeful executioner, judge, warrior, and then, finally, to tears, overwhelmed by the violence. It is the one moment we see how badly the war has affected the young boy, the one moment, at least in this reality, that we see the vulnerability of a young child in war. That the film essentially echoes these scenes, in its final moments in post-war Berlin, where we, together with Galtsev uncover the fate of Ivan, and his execution by German forces, only makes them more striking, and the eventual lingering feeling all the more uncomfortable.

But if Ivan's Childhood typifies anything, captures the early Tarkovsky, it is the dreamlike sense of the film-whilst only taking place over a couple of days before Ivan has his new orders, the film stretches this out to an almost Beckettian eternity. There are multiple vignettes, most notably taking place in a silver-birch forest where the film takes on an otherworldly quality, where the slow drift of the camera, or the sudden twitch into life, as it follows running feet, grant it a peculiar, almost haunted sense. This, together with Tarkovsky's cinematic style, most notably in his use of, at times, impressively long long-takes, as the camera follows our protagonists through the mud and forests, and particularly in the barracks, where scenes are either shot by a stationary camera, or by a slowly drifting perspective. In another director's hands, this would soon become dull, but in Tarkovsky's hands this stillness, this isolation, becomes almost hypnotic.

And it is in the dream sequences that punctuate Ivan's Childhood where this is most obvious, from the opening sequence, in which Tarkovsky's hero's innocence is utterly lost, to the final sequence, where, for lack of a better word, Ivan's innocence is restored. In between these, the two dream sequences that punctuate the film remains astonishing-at one point, the film spectacularly blurs the line between the world of the war and the half-remembered childhood, as the bucket falls and is brought up towards camera multiple times, from the room below where Ivan sleeps. It is, even in the otherwise realistic world of the rest of the film, an astonishing moment, with the other dream an equally surreal, negativised segment where Ivan and his sister travel on a cart in pouring rain. All of these sequences, these moments of, for lack of a better word, an age of innocence before the war, only makes the war that much more savage, that much more harrowing.

Ivan's Childhood, thus, is nothing sort of a masterpiece, a film that perfectly captures the horrors of war, its effect on those left behind in a warzone, in slow, immaculately shot, and almost painterly detail, a film that does not so much roll as slowly unfolds, through the eyes, dreams, and experiences of the ultimately doomed and devastated by war young boy that represents so many like him lost to the chaos, and mindlessness of war. Like few films in cinema, it gives the violence and chaos of war a human, and brutally fragile face

Rating: Must See

For further reading and background on the Khrushchev Thaw, I recommend the following:

https://lossi36.com/2018/10/17/aesthetics-soviet-cinema-1917-1964/
https://medium.com/the-collector/khrushchev-and-the-cinema-28c89320725e
http://inrussia.com/the-cinema-of-soviet-thaw