Ivan's childhood

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Movie
German title Ivan's childhood
Original title Иваново детство
Country of production USSR
original language Russian
Publishing year 1962
length 95 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Andrei Tarkovsky
script Mikhail Papava
production G. Kuznetsov
music Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov
camera Vadim Yusov
cut Lyudmila Feiginova
occupation

Ivan's childhood ( Russian Иваново детство , Iwanowo detstwo ) is the first full-length feature film by the Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky from 1962. The focus is on a 12-year-old boy, played by Kolja Burljajew , who, orphaned by the war, “his annoyance through hardship down ”and won a position in the front line in the intelligence service of the Red Army . In contrast to the heroic depictions that dominated the genre of Soviet war films before the Khrushchev " thaw period " , Ivan's childhood - alongside style-defining works such as The Cranes - was one of the new films based on individual fates after the human tribute asked the war demanded.

On his international debut, Tarkovsky immediately won one of the great prizes - the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1962. Several prominent filmmakers recognized the strong influence that Ivan's childhood had on their work, such as Ingmar Bergman , Sergei Parajanov and Krzysztof Kieślowski (Bergman: “My discovery of Tarkowski's first film was like a miracle”).

action

The front line between the Red Army and the German Wehrmacht , marked by a wide river on Ukrainian soil - the Dnieper - forms the main location of the film. The 12-year-old Ivan, briefly immersed in a bright childhood dream, wakes up alone in a dark hiding place and stalks through a swampy wooded area towards that river under cover of the falling darkness. On the opposite bank he is picked up by Soviet soldiers and taken to the young Lieutenant Galzew. Ivan refuses to give any information and demands that the "51" - the head of the investigation - be reported that he, Bondarew, is back. Reluctantly, Galzew gives in and is ordered to hand the boy paper and pen and to treat him well. Still completely dirty and hypothermic, Iwan describes several sheets of paper and carefully seals them in two envelopes. Galzew carries the already sleeping boy, who has washed himself thoroughly but has hardly eaten, to a bed.

Captain Choline arrives that night and is greeted stormily by Ivan. He is a member of the reconnaissance staff, in whose service the boy spies on the German troops. Ivan's most recent mission is overshadowed by the deaths of the two soldiers who were supposed to pick him up in a boat; therefore he had to swim the river - an achievement that earned him admiration. Iwan knows about the importance of the education and that his small body size predestines him for it. He insists on it when they want to assign him to a military school in the hinterland. But those who urge him to protect him also know what drives him: Ivan is an orphan and has lost father, mother and sister; he himself escaped from a German extermination camp , joined partisans and, when these were worn out, ended up in a boarding school ; from there he fled to find “his” place in the army, which he is now defending with all his might, up to and including fleeing again to make his way back to partisans ... They look for him, pick him up and leave him stay.

Days of waiting for the imminent attack followed. While Ivan delves into reading about military education, Choline and Galzew compete for the doctor's assistant Mascha. In the end, it is the two men who put the boy across the river one night to see him off for his next exploration. On the way back they come under fire, but are able to save themselves, including their human cargo, the two dead soldiers who had paid with their lives on the same mission before them. - A big leap in time suddenly transports the viewer to Berlin, which has already been conquered by the Red Army . Galzew's unit inspects the files of executed Soviet prisoners of war in an abandoned Gestapo quarter , each with a photo. Then Galzew discovers Ivan's too. Shaken, he goes into the execution room, while the film fades back one more time, as at the beginning, and shows the boy playing a children's game on a sunny beach, which ends in a high-spirited race with a younger girl, presumably his sister.

"Wonder child"?

“I know them,” says Iwan, rightly so, when looking at Dürer's Apocalyptic Horsemen , whom he intuitively equates with the German invaders

Within a few minutes of the real action, you see Ivan twice in the arms of grown-up, but by no means huge, men. The appearance alone clearly shows that Ivan is still a child. The film makes this clear even without the dream-like flashbacks to a peaceful past that can only be measured in months. But it also becomes clear that Ivan has every reason for his conviction that only here at the front is the place where he is at peace with his conscience. It is based on an existential shock from suffering. The annihilation of his entire family is not alone. Not even the murder of those eight nameless people, “none older than 19”, whose inscription admonishes the survivors to avenge them. Ivan was interned in one of the German extermination camps. He himself describes it as a "death camp for children", which means that the will to annihilate he encountered there knew no barriers. For this reason alone it is a matter of course for him that this war is also “his business”.

Sections of the Soviet cinema audience saw Ivan as a “child prodigy”, while some Western critics saw a “boy who fell into the war, destroyed by hatred”. From the perspective of media scientist Klaus Kreimeier, only the latter is a clear misunderstanding . A kind of child prodigy - freely designed based on a literary model - could well have been the director's mind, if not based on the example of the “positive hero” of Soviet war film patriotism . As part of his oeuvre, Iwan opens the series of “child prodigies” who, in almost all of his films, embodied “the principle of the 'good', the power of resistance, the idea of ​​a 'new man', even salvation and redemption”. Two lines would become visible in Tarkowski's artistic “vision of the child”: a metaphysical- sanctuary-historical one in his later films, and a materialistic one from this side in his early films . Iwan connects this with his related successor, the bell founder Borischka in Andrei Rublev , played by the same actor, Kolja Burljajew , who is now four years his senior .

style

The film begins with a sharp contrast: A rural idyll bathed in bright light with a cuckoo call, a butterfly flight and a happy boy who knows his mother is nearby is suddenly cut off by the cry of horror “Mama!” And the woman lying on the ground, whereupon the boy awakens in the presence of a dark, devastated world in which he has to hide and make his way through alone. - An emotional rollercoaster ride that immediately challenges the viewer, with the black and white film ( monochrome until the end ) additionally enhancing the contrast between light and dark. The linearity of the narrative on a reality level is later broken up by further dream-like sequences ; one is clearly a vision, the other could also be memories or, following the logic of dreams, a mixture of both. The finale of the film not only surprises with an abrupt jump in place and time, but also with a brief change from fiction to documentation . The focus of these pictures is on the children of their own families killed by the German leadership clique; the connection to the central theme of Ivan's childhood is thus preserved.

Emergence

The Dnieper near Kaniw in Ukraine , the main location of the film

The film is based on the story Ivan by Vladimir Bogomolov , published in 1957 . The screenplay, written by Michail Papawa , should first be made into a film by Eduard Abalow . Mosfilm , however, was not satisfied with the artistic quality of the first version, which is why filming was discontinued in December 1960. In June 1961 it was resumed, now under the direction of Tarkowski, who had applied for it. His motivation was complex. On the one hand, he wanted to express “all [his] hatred of war” in the film and said that the story of a childhood is particularly suitable for this “because it is it that contrasts most strongly with war”. The clash of the two opposites was all the more familiar to Tarkovsky since he had witnessed the onset of war in his childhood at the same age as Ivan. Last but not least, he welcomed the chance to make this film as a touchstone for his vocation to “find out whether or not it was given to me to be a director”.

Two professional colleagues, about the same age as the almost 30-year-old Tarkowski, had already assisted him with his diploma film The Road Roller and the Violin : cameraman Wadim Jussow and co-author of the script Andrei Konschalowski . Both played an important role in the development process of Ivan's childhood . Tarkowski owed Yusov, on the one hand, to the suggestion to seek the vacant director's position and, on the other hand, to the fact that Yusov complied with his wish to bring the camera work closer to the style of Sergei Urusevsky ( The Last Shot , The Cranes Draw ). Konchalovsky, on the other hand, Tarkowski's fellow student at the film school, played a key role in casting the leading role by the young Kolja Burljajew , whom he "discovered" for his short film The Boy and the Dove . He was also available again for Tarkovsky to rework the script (both unnamed). Your most important change was aimed at giving the film a poetic dimension, especially by switching between the reality and dream levels. This met with opposition from the authorities several times. Ultimately, however, Tarkowski prevailed, even if in retrospect he was not satisfied with all of the artistic decisions. The shooting took place from June 15, 1961 to January 18, 1962 on the Dnieper near Kaniv .

reception

Tarkowski's first full-length feature film was a success, both nationally and internationally, with the general public as well as with critics and intellectuals. 16.7 million tickets were sold at the domestic box office alone. Ivan's childhood was the first candidate the Soviet Union ever sent into the race for the Oscar abroad ( 1964 ), but did not make it into the circle of five nominations. Among the international awards, the Golden Lion of the Venice Film Festival 1962 stands out. The award ceremony was followed by a review and a replica , which caused quite a stir. It was L'Unita , the leading organ of the Communist Party of Italy , who accused Tarkowski of overemphasizing the lyrical and exchanging his class consciousness for bourgeois aestheticism . Jean-Paul Sartre condemned this attack as a relapse into Stalinist dogmatism and praised the style of the film in the following words: “Indeed, the lyrical elements of the film, the troubled sky, the still waters, the endless forests also represent the life of Ivan, the Love and the roots of life that are denied him; what he once was; what it still is without ever being able to remember it; what the others see in and around him and what he can no longer see. I know of nothing more moving than this long, infinitely slow, tense sequence by the river: despite their fear and insecurity (was it right to expose a child to such dangers?) The officers who accompany him are filled with desperate, terrifying tenderness . "

The production and reception of Ivan's childhood were dominated by the " thaw period " initiated by Khrushchev . Until then, the mainstream of domestic (anti) war films was considered to celebrate the glorious Soviet people who, under Stalin's brilliant leadership, stood the test of time in the fight against the Nazis . Tarkowski's debut film was now among those who really deserved the prefix “anti-” by giving the war a face that spoke of real human suffering. These included Grigori Tschuchrai's The Ballad of the Soldier , Sergei Bondarchuk's Ein Menschenschicksal and Mikhail Kalatosov's Die Cranes Drag , which Tarkovsky mainly emulated stylistically. Critics named Andrzej Wajda's Ashes and Diamonds and Luis Buñuel's The Forgotten as further possible models . Notable directors who, for their part, admitted that Ivan's childhood had a great influence on them were Ingmar Bergman , Sergei Parajanov and Krzysztof Kieślowski . Bergman said: “My discovery of Tarkowski's first film was a miracle. Suddenly I found myself standing in front of the door to a room whose keys had never been given to me before. It was a room that I always wanted to enter and where it moved freely and with ease. "

Awards

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Klaus Kreimeier : Iwan's childhood. First published in: Andrej Tarkowskij; Volume 39 of the Film series, published in cooperation with the Deutsche Kinemathek Foundation by Peter W. Jansen and Wolfram Schütte, published by Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich / Vienna 1987; Second publication in the filmzentrale with the kind permission of Carl Hanser Verlag, accessed on July 28, 2020.
  2. ^ A b Vida T. Johnson, Graham Petrie: The films of Andrei Tarkovsky: a visual fugue. Indiana University Press, 1994, ISBN 0-253-20887-4 , p. 77.
  3. ^ A b Ingmar Bergman : On Tarkovsky. www.nostalghia.com (English, own transmission), accessed on July 28, 2020.
  4. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Dina Iordanova: Ivan's Childhood: Dream Come True. The Criterion Collection , January 22, 2013 (own broadcast), accessed on July 28, 2020.
  5. ↑ imdb
  6. ↑ Segida, Miroslava; Sergei Zemlianukhin (1996). Domashniaia sinemateka: Otechestvennoe kino 1918-1996 (Russian)
  7. ^ Jean-Paul Sartre : Discussion on the criticism of Ivan's Childhood. www.nostalghia.com (English, translation into German by Klaus Kreimeier, details see there.)