Ivan's Childhood (1962)

To start this blog of mine, I am going to explore the work of one of the greatest auteurs of all time, Andrei Tarkovsky. His work is very much new to me so I am going to use these reviews to portray my raw reactions to his work. I will work through his filmography in chronological order, starting with his debut feature, Ivan’s Childhood (Tarkovsky, 1962). I will put a spoiler warning here as I do cover a couple of crucial plot points in this discussion. These are also very subjective readings of the film so you may analyse it completely differently to me. Feel free to discuss these opinions in the comments. Now, let's try and process Ivan’s Childhood.

This deeply tragic, yet poetic film follows a 12 year old protagonist, Ivan, who acts as a scout for the Russian military as a way of seeking revenge on the Nazi’s who killed his family. Immediately, Tarkovsky juxtaposes the innocence of childhood with the horrors of war through one of several dream sequences within the film. Ivan can be seen floating through the trees with a beaming smile that reflects the sun which saturates the screen. This utopia is then shattered by Ivan’s much darker and dirtier reality as he tries to make it back to the Russian HQ. 

Tarkovsky portrays the violence of war and the fragility it creates despite not depicting a single violent scene within the film. For example, the dream sequence in which Ivan looks down on himself at the bottom of a well. As the camera pans down to follow a feather Ivan drops down the well, he suddenly gets trapped in the watery depths of the well. At this moment, off-screen we hear his mother fall, quickly cutting to a high angle shot of her body as a bucket of water is thrown over it. While no violence is visually displayed, the connotations layered into the scene are what makes this so devastating. The dark walls of the well isolate Ivan from the devastation befalling his family which in turn creates a feeling of grief and helplessness that fuels Ivan’s revenge in the real world.

The perspective of such a bleak and brutal reality through the eyes of a child echoes Italian neo-realist films such as Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948) and Germany Year Zero (Rossellini, 1948). The difference with Tarkovsky’s portrayal is that I believe he offers an element of hope in the final moments of the film which isn’t shown in the aforementioned Italian neo-realist films. Ivan’s Childhood concludes with a dream sequence, much like its opening. We witness Ivan running along a beach towards a symbolic tree which has appeared as a motif throughout the film. By using this as the final shot, Tarkovsky is implicitly illustrating cinema as a tool to expand upon life. Despite Ivan’s death in the real world, which occurs off screen, our final visions of him are joyous and exciting. Therefore, to the audience he lives on eternally, running towards the tree of life with a smile on his face.

As Tarkovsky is a very complex director, his films will take multiple watches to fully digest and attempt to understand his allegorical meanings. These blogs act as my initial reactions, thoughts and analysis of the film and are likely to change in the future. For now though, thank you for reading and I will be back shortly with a new post.