Ivan's Childhood

The premise of Ivan's Childhood is that of a gritty war film: twelve years old Ivan has lost his family to the invading germans during the Second World War, and is a scout for the Red Army, consumed by revenge. Instead of plunging into the dark material of warfare, Andrei Tarkovsky choses to present his directorial debut with a much more uplifting sequence: Ivan is playing, running into the fields, listening to the sounds of nature. Then, the sudden revelation: it's only a dream. Ivan is actually a scout, hiding in a mill on the shores of the war-torn Dnepr river. 

Ivan's Childhood continuously balances between the very concrete and cold realm of war-time and something intangible, present but immaterial. It is not yet spirituality - the only religious iconography is amidst the ruins of a church used as a military base by the protagonists. It is rather a sense of onyric, the nostalgic memory, of a childhood that Ivan already remembers with adult fondness as a child himself. At first, this form of metaphysics remains exclusively related to the dreamlike dimension, but then, it starts permeating to the reality. 

The plot derails, and lingers on two side characters' courtship in a birch forest, one of the most popular scenes of the film; a traveling slowly breaks a scene of tension, moving over the water reflections of a marsh. It is these elements that introduce for the first time the visual poetry that will characterize Tarkovsky's cinematic language, and it is in this form that the first hints of a spirituality yet to descend upon him can be perceived. Then, the conclusion ensues, enigmatic, mimetic, yet very clearly poiting at a possible existence beyond the material life - as much as it is allowed in a Soviet movie about the Great Patriotic War, that is.

While it is the first sparks of metaphysics that make Ivan's Childhood such an important film, all of this remains ornamental to a work that is primarily set in a degraded, hostile environment, in which a child, traumatized and blinded by hate, is exploited by the military. The tragic sense of the film flows from the continuous hopelessness of Ivan's experiences to a degree that it simply does not allow an ascension: the story itself is too bleak for that.

Cinema in 1962 was undergoing significant changes. Antonioni had just destructured the concept of a plot with L'Avventura. The Nouvelle Vague have dislocated everything else. Kalatozov had just introduced in the soviet imaginary a whole range of visual language. Ivan's Childhood is a magical moment in worldwide cinema. Sergei Parajanov described it as an epiphany. It is a film that listens to the new sensibilities of the art of cinema, but that also opens the gates to a more elevated meaning, though not yet attained, not yet conscious. 

The film was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, marking the first debut film to obtain the award in history. 

RATING: 4/5

Original title: Ivanovo Detstvo

Directed by: Andrei Tarkovsky

Country: USSR

Year: 1962

Length: 95 min.

Premiere: Venice Film Festival 1962

Availability: Youtube (official Mosfilm channel), The Criterion Channel (US only)

GOLDEN LION FOR BEST FILM