Ivan's Childhood

Dir: Andrei Tarkovsky

1962

*****

Ivan's Childhood was Tarkovsky's first feature film, shot two years after his diploma film The Steamroller and the Violin. Now The Steamroller and the Violin was a hell of a diploma film, I went to film school and no one made anything that was even close to how good it is, and that is with better budgets, better equipment etc but I still can’t quite believe the achievement made within just two years. Based on the 1957 short story Ivan by Vladimir Bogomolov. It drew the attention of the screenwriter Mikhail Papava, who changed the story line and made Ivan more of a hero. Papava called his screenplay Second Life and in this screenplay Ivan is not executed, but sent to the concentration camp Majdanek, from where he is freed by the advancing Soviet army. The final scene of this screenplay shows Ivan meeting one of the officers of the army unit in a train compartment. Bogomolov, unsatisfied with this ending, intervened and the screenplay was changed to reflect the source material. Mosfilm gave the screenplay to the young film director Eduard Abalov. Shooting was aborted and the film project was terminated in December 1960, since the first version of the film drew heavy criticism from the arts council, and the quality was deemed unsatisfactory and unusable. In June 1961 the film project was given to Tarkovsky, who had applied for it after being told about Ivan's Childhood by cinematographer Vadim Yusov. Work on the film resumed in the same month. Tarkovsky continued his collaboration with cinematographer Vadim Yusov, who was the cameraman in The Steamroller and the Violin. The film is mainly set at the front during World War II, where the Soviet army is fighting the invading German Wehrmacht. The film has a non-linear plot and uses frequent flashbacks, something that would become a trend in Tarkovsky’s films. After a brief dream sequence, Ivan Bondarev, a 12-year-old Russian boy, wakes up and crosses a war-torn landscape to a swamp, then swims across a river. On the other side, he is seized by Russian soldiers and brought to the young Lieutenant Galtsev, who interrogates him. The boy insists that he call "Number 51 at Headquarters" and report his presence. Galtsev is reluctant, but when he eventually makes the call, he is told by Lieutenant-Colonel Gryaznov to give the boy pencil and paper to make his report, which will be given the highest priority, and to treat him well. Through a series of dream sequences and conversations between different characters, it is revealed that Ivan’s mother and sister (and probably his father, a border guard) have been killed by German soldiers. He got away and joined a group of partisans. When the group was surrounded, they put him on a plane. After the escape, he was sent to a boarding school, but he ran away and joined an army unit under the command of Gryaznov. Burning for revenge, Ivan insists on fighting on the front line. Taking advantage of his small size, he is successful on reconnaissance missions. Gryaznov and the other soldiers grow fond of him and want to send him to a military school. They give up their idea when Ivan tries to run away and rejoin the partisans. He is determined to avenge the death of his family and others, such as those killed at the Maly Trostenets extermination camp (which he mentions that he has seen). A subplot involves Captain Kholin and his aggressive advances towards a pretty army nurse, Masha, and Galtsev's own undeclared and probably shared feelings for her. Much of the film is set in a room where the officers await orders and talk, while Ivan awaits his next mission. On the walls are scratched the last messages of doomed prisoners of the Germans. Finally, Kholin and Galtsev ferry Ivan across the river late at night. He disappears through the swampy forest. The others return to the other shore after cutting down the bodies of two Soviet scouts hanged by the Germans. The final scenes then switch to Berlin under Soviet occupation after the fall of the Third Reich. Captain Kholin has been killed in action. Galtsev finds a document showing that Ivan was caught and hanged by the Germans. As Galtsev enters the execution room, a final flashback of Ivan's childhood shows the young boy running across a beach after a little girl in happier times. The final image is of a dead tree on the beach. It’s a hell of a first feature film to lobby for but in many respects it was the making of the director. I think whatever his debut would have been it would have been brilliant but there is something about this story in particular that seems fitting and perhaps it molded all of his future works. Tarkovsky stated that in making the film he wanted to "convey all his hatred of war", and that he chose childhood "because it is what contrasts most with war.” It won him critical acclaim and made him internationally known. It won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1962 and the Golden Gate Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival. The film was also selected as the Soviet entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 36th Academy Awards, but was not accepted as a nominee. Famous filmmakers such as Ingmar Bergman, Sergei Parajanov and Krzysztof Kieślowski praised the film and later cited it as an influence on their work. It I still Tarkovsky's most commercially successful film but the only one he ever admitted to having regrets over. Displeased with some aspects of the film, in his book Sculpting in Time, he writes at length about subtle changes to certain scenes that he regrets not implementing. I don’t believe any truly great artist is ever satisfied with their own work and I wonder whether Tarkovsky's regrets in Ivan’s Childhood helped carve key ideas in his future work. It is impossible to choose a favourite Tarkovsky film or indeed which one is most influential, but you could probably argue that Ivan’s Childhood was probably the most influential to his own career. It’s a masterpiece, no one has made a greater debut and then followed it up with masterpiece, after masterpiece, after masterpiece. Is Tarkovsky the greatest film maker who ever lived? Probably, yes.