Ivan's Childhood [The Criterion Collection] [Blu-ray]

A very moving war film, see largely through the eyes of a young boy, Ivan. Shows with poignancy the awfulness and futility of war.

Anyone wanting to explore Andrei Tarkovsky's works in detail, Ivan's Childhood is probably a great introduction,Not only being Tarkovsky's cinematic debut but his most emotional accessible film whilst hinting to greater artistic heights to come. All his cinematographic trademarks with intense close ups, long drawn out scenes with haunting landscape and emotional tensions are to be seen in its narrative. This is more than just another war film, there's many complex themes explored including metaphysics, dreams, emotions and symbolism running through this impressive piece of cinema. Please note English subtitles available just turn them on.

Incredible War time film.

Tarkovsky's amazing symbolic imagery shines in his debut film.

Not a great work by the master but I guess he had to start off by pleasing the Soviet authorities at some point in his career

This is a review of Artificial Eye's original Russico release print on DVD. I thought I'd post it here to give this wonderful film all the help it can get.****************Andrey Tarkovsky is for me alongside Robert Bresson the greatest film director the world has ever seen. He made seven extraordinary feature films: Ivan's Childhood (1962), Andrey Rublyov (1966), Solaris (1972), Mirror (1974), Stalker (1979), Nostalghia (1983) and The Sacrifice (1986). Born 1932 in Zavrozhie on the Volga, Tarkovsky graduated from VGIK (the Gerasimov All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography) with his first (short) film, The Steamroller and the Violin in 1960. He made his next five films in the USSR before choosing foreign exile to make Nostalghia (in Italy) and finally The Sacrifice (in Sweden). He died in Paris in 1986. As with Bresson, Tarkovsky's film career was a difficult one in which he battled to secure funding and fought the rigid parameters set by Soviet officialdom to make intensely `personal' films which addressed people's spiritual and poetic feelings rather than buttering up to the dictates of Communist party dogma. Twenty years of battling meddling bureaucrats drove him out of Russia in pursuit of an expression of his artistic freedom. This `freedom' came at a great price - his family was refused permission to join him and he came to harbor an intense homesickness (articulated most strongly in Nostalghia) brought about by his separation from Russian soil.Before I look at the film under review I want first to make a few introductory comments about Tarkovsky. He has accrued a reputation for self-indulgent obscurity which is not wholly deserved. His films are challenging and deeply personal, but their intellectual demands are not as great as many studies seem to suggest and they remain gloriously accessible for anyone with the eyes to see. First of all I should point everyone towards Tarkovsky's truly wonderful book constituting his reflections on cinema entitled Sculpting in Time. One of the best books on cinema ever written, it not only casts valuable light on his works and methods, but it also offers a lucid discussion of the role of art in the 20th century and the place of cinema within it. Nobody writes better about the films than the director himself and I quote liberally from this source in what follows.For Tarkovsky (as for Bresson) film making is an art form and the film-maker an artist. Over and above everything else film making is a poetic act, an attempt to make a masterpiece which gets as near as possible to an understanding of man's existence on Earth. He says: "Artistic creation, after all, is not subject to absolute laws, valid from age to age; since it is related to the more general aim of mastery of the world, it has an infinite number of facets, the vincula that connect man with his vital activity; and even if the path towards knowledge is unending, no step that takes man nearer to a full understanding of his existence can be too small to count". For Tarkovsky then a film attempts a metaphysical grasp on the nature of existence through poetry with the main narrative of each film usually depicting a quest on the part of the main character (or characters) for answers to the eternal questions about the nature of existence. At the risk of simplifying, these questions largely center on matters of faith, the existence (or not) of God, the battle between the arts and the sciences and the human pursuit of increased knowledge as a good or a bad thing. The films may all constitute quests, but they do not work purely as linear narratives with clearly demarcated beginnings, middles and ends. Beyond the quest the plot of any given Tarkovsky film is really beside the point. What does matter are the poetic links made between creator and creation and between creation and the created - audiences who see themselves mirrored somehow within these amazing works of art. He writes: "My most fervent wish has always been to be able to speak out in my films, to say everything with total sincerity and without imposing my own point of view on others. But if your vision of the world turns out to be one that others recognize as a part of themselves what better motivation could there be for one's work?" He doesn't want us to respond to his films merely intellectually with our heads, but emotionally with our hearts and souls - "I find poetic links, the logic of cinema, extraordinarily pleasing. They seem to me perfectly appropriate to the potential of cinema as the most truthful and poetic of art forms". For those capable of a poetic and emotional response watching (and re-watching) these films becomes one of art's most extraordinary experiences. I have been revisiting for 30 years now and have never been less than awestruck by what I have found within these masterpieces. I may not be able to articulate in words why I am so moved, but I suppose therein lies the profundity of Tarkovsky's art. He communicates in a special way that only cinema can provide and which lies beyond words.What I have just said might perhaps only confirm the suspicions many have about Tarkovsky being `difficult', `obscure', `pretentious', `esoteric', and `impenetrable'. I think it's important to understand that these accusations come from people who do not (perhaps cannot) reach out for an emotional poetic understanding. Perhaps blinded by the prevailing tendency of most cinema (even that of most other great directors) to communicate in terms of self-contained stories which resolve themselves by the films' closure, their response is purely intellectual rather than emotional. Tarkovsky's films start from the point of view that life or reality can never be related in self-contained logical stories - "the usual logic, that of linear sequentiality, is uncomfortably like the proof of a geometry theorem. As a method it is incomparably less fruitful artistically than the possibilities opened up by associative thinking, which allows for an affective as well as a rational response". Reality is best approached obliquely in a way that encourages (necessitates) the audience take an active role in the film's process. He said: "Through poetic connections feeling is heightened and the spectator is made more active. He becomes a participant in the process of discovering life, unsupported by ready-made deductions from the plot or ineluctable pointers by the author". In this way a film such as Mirror which seems to be so complex and impenetrable intellectually is actually very simple if approached emotionally and empathetically. As one Leningrad factory worker wrote in a letter to Tarkovsky: "My reason for writing is Mirror, a film I can't even talk about because I am living it". This simplicity means that for the director anyone, even children, can watch his films and get something from them. People are born with an innate ability to appreciate art and if they have a spiritual or poetic propensity then intellectual acuity is certainly not a prerequisite for understanding his films - "Anyone who wants can look at my films as into a mirror, in which he will see himself".Many commentators have written long appreciations of Tarkovsky which focus on references made to artists (notably da Vinci and Bruegel) and writers (the Holy Trinity of Pushkin, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky) as well as draw attention to the various symbols and metaphors which they claim keep re-occurring through his films. We should beware reading anything concrete into them for he says quite unequivocably, "I declare that there are no symbols or metaphors in my films". It is true the four natural elements of water, fire, earth and air are omnipresent throughout all seven films and that many of the stunningly created poetic scenes of trees blowing in slow motion, buildings blazing afire, water dripping or falling as rain both inside and outside buildings serve to create that quintessential `Tarkovsky mood' which seems to cry out for interpretation. It is also true that animals, especially horses, dogs, doves and hens crop up as if they are re-occurring tropes or motifs conveying hidden meanings which must be deduced, but we should beware slapping labels onto them and saying the meanings are always the same. Actually the meanings differ greatly throughout the films and we should ask ourselves more, by using constantly re-occurring ticks and tropes what are the feelings Tarkovsky engenders within us? How do we relate to these absolutely mesmerizing vistas of exquisite beauty? Obviously the way we see `reality' mirrored in these works is going to be different for all of us. There is no one correct explanation - that is after all the very definition of reality. It is all a matter of individual perception and it is a mistake to narrow interpretations down to singular unbending meanings - "As soon as mise-en-scène turns into a sign, a cliché, a concept (however original it may be), then the whole thing - characters, situations, psychology - becomes schematic and false". So be warned - do not over-intellectualize. My best advice would actually be to put aside the usual tools of critical intellectual interpretation - sit down and watch Tarkovsky's films as if you are a child. I think then you will open yourself up more and intuit a lot more closely what this marvelous director is all about.Ivan's Childhood was Tarkovsky's first feature film. It came to him through the cinematographer Vadim Yusov who had shot The Steamroller and the Violin for him two years before and was searching for someone to replace the unfortunate Eduard Abalov, a young director who had failed to impress the Soviet arts council with his version of Vladimir Bogomolov's 1957 short story Ivan. With the cast and crew already in place and half the budget already spent Tarkovsky agreed to finish the film - "If the film turns out well, I thought, then I'll have the right to work in the cinema. Ivan's Childhood was therefore specially important. It was my qualifying examination". In the event he passed with flying colors. It won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and has a claim to being one of the greatest debut films ever made.With the catastrophic losses suffered by Russia in World War Two, the conflict came to have a huge symbolical significance for the Russian people and war stories like Bogomolov's were extremely common in the 50s and 60s. It was entirely typical then that a young director's debut feature be a war film centered largely on depicting the lost innocence of the Russian nation. Tarkovsky's film (largely true to Bogomolov's story) centers on a boy soldier named Ivan (played in the film by Nikolai Burlyayev) who has lost his entire family to the Nazis. He executes scouting missions along a river deep in the south Russian countryside for the paternal Colonel Gryaznov (Nikolai Grinko) and Captain Kholin (Valentin Zubkov). He is also befriended by the young Lieutenant Galtsev (Evgeny Zharikov) who comes to look after him. The relationship between the boy and his seniors becomes the main focus of the film. The story takes place in a lull between two missions and depicts the dilemma of the elder soldiers who want to send the boy to the backlines away from the conflict and the boy who obstinately refuses to cooperate. There is also a young nurse named Masha (Valentina Malyavina) who functions as both a depiction of innocence and as the point of erotic conflict between Galtsev and the older Kholin who asserts his authority to win the girl. Galtsev's youth and inexperience is stressed throughout the film. Not only does he lose out to Kholin over the girl, but even Ivan (a young boy) is mentally tougher and more mature than he is. The boy inevitably undertakes his last mission and disappears for good from the film. In the original Mikhail Papava script Ivan ends up in Majdanek concentration camp and is liberated by his friends at the end of the war. Tarkovsky darkened this making for a very different ending. He has Galtsev (no longer a naïve young lad) go all the way to Berlin to witness the total collapse of Nazi Germany. In the basement of the Gestapo headquarters he happens across a file with Ivan's photograph on it piled together with hundreds of other similar files. These are the records of partisans executed by the Germans during the war.This brief précis may give the impression that the film is no more than a routine Russian anti-Nazi propaganda pot boiler and as originally scripted by Papava and Bogomolov and directed by Abalov no doubt it originally was little more than that. In Tarkovsky's hands however the film comes alive in the most startling way possible. According to Johnson and Petrie (in their excellent book on Tarkovsky entitled A Visual Fugue) Tarkovsky together with uncredited screenwriter Andrei Konchalovsky fought both Bogomolov and the Soviet authorities to impose huge changes which made for a very different film. As he says: "Working on Ivan's Childhood we encountered protests from the film authorities every time we tried to replace causality with poetic articulations".It is precisely in these 'poetic articulations' that the film succeeds. These are on display most obviously in the four dream sequences which showcase the typical 'Tarkovsky style' which will never leave him throughout the rest of his films. It's worth examining these briefly. The first dream starts even before the film does with a cuckoo on the soundtrack. The first shot shows a boy (Ivan) looking through (entrapped in) a spider's web hanging between a tree and a bush. The camera pans up the tree just as it will also pan up a tree in the very last shot of The Sacrifice 20 years later. The camera cuts to Ivan's face. He is moving, it seems gliding upwards into the air, the trees and bushes whizzing past him. He levitates over the forest to the well by the road where his mother (Irma Raush - Tarkovsky's first wife) is standing. Both mother and son are happy until something happens off-screen and the mother starts in fright and the dream finishes with Ivan waking up in a ruined windmill in the middle of a bleak battlefield. Within this dream we have several elements which will become staple with Tarkovsky - the invasion of normality by fantasy, the love of nature (trees, bushes, sunlight, birds, insects), flight (levitation), the connection of mother with water (the well) and the presence of autobiographical detail - "All four dreams [in the film]...are based on quite specific associations. The first, for instance, from start to finish, right up to the words, "Mum, there's a cuckoo!" is one of my earliest childhood recollections", says Tarkovsky.The second dream prefigures even more strongly the dank eerie world of Mirror and Stalker. Ivan falls asleep after a bath in Galtsev's room. He dreams about water dripping from his hands. The sound is amplified so as to echo (another signature Tarkovsky effect) and suddenly he is at the bottom of a well. His mother is at the top as she drops a single feather. Suddenly they are both at the top reaching down trying to catch the star in the water which retreats from their reach. Once again Ivan is at the bottom watching a bucket being lowered. Suddenly there is a gunshot and his mother is jerked out of sight. The bucket falls and Tarkovsky cuts to the mother's body lying face-down on the road being splashed with water in slow motion. Again we have the natural elements present - water, air (the falling feather) and earth (the mother's final resting place) together with a progression from happiness to nightmare.The third dream is the most celebrated of them all in that it shows Ivan on the open back of a truck loaded with apples playing with his sister as they drive down the road in the pouring rain. Ivan offers an apple three times to his sister which she rejects each time with a slightly more severe face. The camera spins around seemingly in one continuous shot to show the three reactions which gradually darken - a Tarkovsky effect which will become a staple part of his universe. The sequence is shot startlingly with back projection with vivid strikes of lightning which make it one of Tarkovsky's most artificially achieved (but still extraordinary) sequences. The final shot with a high camera angle has the truck arrive at a beach (the location of the final dream sequence) with the apples spilling poetically onto the sand as horses come to nibble. With the striking music of Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov, there is a lyricism here of a very high order of accomplishment.As the film starts with a dream so it finishes with one as well. Ivan is playing odd man out followed by hide and seek with his friends on the beach. He finds his sister and runs after her, the camera tracking with him in an extraordinarily smooth single take - in a time before steadicam this whole sequence is no mean achievement. Ivan catches up and then over-takes his sister, running towards his goal - a blasted tree into which the film fades and ends. The way the drums on the soundtrack build on the soundtrack we can tell there is an element of ominous premonition here - the boy's future will be savagely truncated just as the tree's has been. Note also the combination of Tarkovskian tropes - Ivan drinking water from a bucket at his mother's feet (mother connected with water), water (the sea), air (wind), the trees which frame the sequence and the shift in tone from happy reality to impending tragedy.The total effect of these dreams is to destabilize the audience so that we are never sure what is dream and what is not. This invests the main part of the film (the story of the boy with his seniors) with a hallucinatory quality which is eons more sophisticated than other war films of the time. The way Tarkovsky moves his camera (the celebrated fluid camerawork of this film is rather different from the more static style of his later work) and cuts between shots constantly emphasize the fantastic throughout the film. Note how the first dream ends. Ivan wakes up in the windmill and leaves. We see in long shot a figure leaving the place only for Ivan to suddenly enter the foreground from beside the camera. How did he move so fast? Impossible except in a dream. Then there's the sequence where Ivan is left alone in the room where he starts to play with a large church bell. Suddenly we are in the middle of a boy's role-play game which turns into the nightmare of a real attack during which his mother appears again. There is nothing to distinguish this 'real life' sequence from the obvious dream sequences. Then there are those hallucinatory and tremendously accomplished tracking shots through the nocturnal forest as Ivan performs his missions which frame the film. Elsewhere great subtlety is shown where the boy in the wood behind the spider web (in the dream) is contrasted later with the girl Masha in the forest and Kholin (in reality). The forest has the same white birches and the girl also sees a spider's web, the spider turning out to be Kholin himself as he traps her suspended over a ditch for a kiss. In subtle ways such as these Tarkovsky invests the whole film with a magical sense of poetry which is wholly beguiling. Some of the cuts are so stunning that one's breath is taken away. We are taken into the torture chamber in the basement of the Gestapo building and shown the instruments of torture among them a large guillotine. As the music wells horrifically Tarkovsky cuts from the guillotine to Ivan's head seemingly rolling freely. Only a fraction later do we realize we have segued into a dream and the boy is playing with his mates, his head still attached for now to his shoulders.The hallucinatory quality of Ivan's Childhood which merges dream with reality so impressively makes for a superb poetic depiction of the effects of war on childhood innocence. What takes Tarkovsky's magnificent achievement even beyond that is the way the film becomes a metaphysical statement on the effect war had on Russia's very soul. This is done by incorporating numerous religious references into the mise-en-scène. Most important is the way most of the film plays out in Galtsev's room which happens to be the crypt of a bombed-out Russian orthodox church which one is tempted to suggest is a metaphor for Russia itself. The combat sequence is sparked off by Ivan playing with a large church bell (it's perhaps not coincidental that Burlyayev - Ivan - was later cast in Andrey Rublyov as the bell caster) and as the shells explode around the ruin Tarkovsky cuts to icons painted on the walls and most obviously a huge crucifix which stands defiantly until after the attack finishes. In fact look closely and we see crucifixes pervade the film - other burned-out churches litter the skyline and we even have the German cross painted on the fusillade of a crashed fighter plane. Also important is the German book of engravings by Albrecht Dürer, most notably The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse suggesting the havoc wreaked not only by the German army in the present, but in the Book of Revelations in the past and possible future. Then there is the record player which plays a religious motet sung by the sacred Russian bass Chaliapin. The effect of all these religious references is to broaden the scope of the film away from a small unit of Russian soldiers fighting in a minor battle on a muddy river side nobody has ever heard of toward Russia and her turbulent history of which World War Two was just one in a series of huge political, economic and spiritual upheavals which have dominated her bloody history. This links in very well with the historical pageant of Andrey Rublyov which Tarkovsky started to prepare immediately after this film wrapped. And why limit the film's relevance only to Russia? Surely the story of compromised childhood innocence Tarkovsky tells is equally relevant for any society which has Christian faith as its dominant disseminator of cultural life. Thought through like this Tarkovsky's film attains a level of great profundity.This is a review of Artificial Eye's first 2002 release of this film. The DVD can be highly recommended - the picture is extremely well-defined (aspect ratio 4:3 - 1.33:1) and the sound (Mono) very clear. I have read bad things about AE's recent re-releases of Tarkovsky's films which some have found over-digitalized. There are no such fears with this older one however. There are also some substantial extras including a short documentary on the use of children during the war and interviews with staff members which are interesting if not completely focused on the film in question. No matter, I give this release the strongest possible recommendation.

Masterpiece

THIS WAS NOT IN HD! VERY ANNOYING.