Every Little Thing I Adore About 'Ivan's Childhood'

Andrei Tarkovsky is my favourite film-maker and it’s always a pleasure to re-visit his landmark first feature. It’s a true testament to the man’s extraordinary artistry that this sublime work of groundbreaking filmic poetry feels more like a prelude to the profound genius to follow than a defining peak of his oeuvre- but I love it all the same. At a little over 90 minutes, this has always been my vote for the perfect entry point into the director’s work.

Part of what makes Ivan’s Childhood so fascinating as the debut film by one of cinema’s most iconic auteurs is that it was essentially a director-for-hire job: With the Soviet authorities seeking to replace a young film-maker whose had already spent half(!) the budget on work they considered sub-par. Tarkovsky agreed to take on the project with this majorly restricted budget and schedule provided he was allowed creative freedom, which the studio granted. The rest, as they say, is history.

 

Another one of my favourite film-makers, Ingmar Bergman, reflected on seeing Ivan's Childhood for the first time as follows:

“My discovery of Tarkovsky’s first film was like a miracle. Suddenly, I found myself standing at a door of a room the keys of which had, until then, never been given to me. It was a room I had always wanted to enter and where he was moving freely and fully at ease. I felt encountered and stimulated: Someone was expressing what I had always wanted to say without knowing how. Tarkovsky is for me the greatest, the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection- life as a dream.”

It’s a testament to this film’s unique poetic magic that this same spell lingers over half a century later. Right from the opening shot, Tarkovsky’s sublime sensitivity for imagery and atmosphere enrapture the screen.

I love the way the camera cranes up to reveal Ivan, who’s walked far into the distance since we last saw him a few seconds ago. As Tarkovsky’s career went on this kind of in-camera surreality would become a hallmark of his style- and it’s wonderful to see his interest in it evidenced from the very first shot of his debut.

The way these naturalistic hand-held POV shots dovetail into a gorgeous double-crane lift-off where Ivan and the camera go soaring through the air together. It evokes the same floating feeling as Spike Lee’s brilliant double-dolly technique decades later and so beautifully encapsulates the delirious wonder of childhood.

Ivan falling back to earth through the camera in POV, as his mother looks right up into the lens. Little more than a minute in, Ivan’s Childhood serves up rich, unchained imagery with such freedom and clarity that it’s no wonder it was an instant inspiration to so many of our finest film-makers.

 How suddenly we’re snatched out of Ivan’s luminous dream into a murky, apocalyptic hellscape. Tarkovsky jolts the audience with the same sharp shift of war that the character has the endure- and the continued presence of warped, oneiric imagery twists this grim reality into a long-running nightmare Ivan desperately wishes he could wake up from.

You might think the brutal horror of war might be a bad fit for such a poetic eye- but part of the power of Tarkovsky’s vision is creating an aesthetic that frames conflict as some kind of mutated aberration of our world. Something that has ripped reality in half and made its home in its ruins. It’s not a heroic pursuit- it’s a plague that scars the land itself with a shrill spatter of craters, bones and blood.

There’s something so quietly haunting about these intimate opening credits, where we watch this child- without even the sound of his own voice to keep him company- tug a log out of some reeds and use it to try and drift across the freezing waters as flares rain down from above. It doesn’t matter if they are from enemy or allied forces- these thin streaks of light are frightening evidence that war has found him, even in this remote stretch of nature. Nowhere is safe for little Ivan except the sweet sleep of death.

I love the way Tarkovsky reveals Ivan once he’s been caught, in a close-up tracking shot that crawls through a disorienting void of almost complete darkness only for us to find ourselves face to face with this poor child- his face already horrifically far from its freshness in his dreams. Tarkovsky so effectively mimics Ivan’s own disoriented fear in this room swallowed by shadow.

I’ve often guessed at what exactly Ivan’s inventory represents here. Could it be that each item represents a piece of enemy ordinance? A tank, platoon or anti-aircraft encampment- and his childlike logic has deemed it fitting to represent each item with a nearby berry or leaf? It’s a great detail and Tarkovsky, as was always his gift, trust his audience with the power to wonder what it means for themselves.

Love how confidently we cut to a tight tracking-shot that runs across the floor through common household objects- purely to set the atmosphere for the dream soon to come.

I’ve always absolutely adored this physical dream transition where we pan up from the bed in the military bunker to reveal we are suddenly at a bottom of the well, from which Ivan is looking up at himself. Again, it’s the confidence of Tarkovsky’s poetic logic that shines so clearly here, right from his debut. The man’s style could shift freely between reality, memory and dreams as naturally as breathing precisely because he always did so with absolute conviction. Film can only be at its most free when it fully believes in itself.

This perfectly fitting throw-away line that ties into the infinite mystery of our resting subconscious.

I assume they got this brilliant effect by positioning the camera under glass and then pouring water on top so that droplets can create active ripples across the character’s faces- and it’s a stunningly simple, beautiful effect.

And how magical to have Ivan literally reach into the water and in doing so blur the lens with ripples, as if he’s playing with the fabric of the film itself! All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

The elegantly sinister visual rhyme of Ivan’s mother’s blood spilled here as a spatter of water in the dust. Tarkovsky was always fascinated by water and this sequence makes me think as the well as a metaphor for life: Ivan still at the bottom, barely ankle-deep in his own experiences, searching for the shimmering light of pure innocence that still shines  bright at the base of his life. Perhaps if we let life break us down, those tears fill our well until that once-vivid spark of youthful hope is drowned in the depths. Once the water spills over the rim, our time is up.

The Rublev-esque religious icon barely clinging to the skeleton of this ruined church. With the blue sky suffocated by a sea of smog, it’s a fleeting but powerful image you can see having a big impact on the likes of Béla Tarr.

It’s a lovely toast, instead of celebrating their current health it always seems to bittersweetly call forth to some hopeful future that they will meet again soon some other place- perhaps after the hell that ravages their lives has long passed.

It’s fascinating to observe how Tarkovsky experiments with the framing of his dialogue scenes in this first film, shooting in single takes from one angle with ensemble staging that echoes Kurosawa’s carefully composed group shots. It’s a little theatrical- but he was still finding his feet and at least it’s interesting. Even if your gambles don’t work, it’s better to try and at least end up as a fascinating failure than slip out of everyone’s memory immediately with bland old shot-reverse-shot.

Even in a throw-away transitional shot, Tarkovsky & co’s composition is second to none. I also wonder if that desolate line of leaning telegraph poles inspired an equally brilliant image in another stunning Soviet war film, Larisa Shepitko’s ‘The Ascent’.

One of the most classic examples of meaningful production design I can think of. This image is instantly iconic- and so eloquently expresses all the film’s themes and raging emotions without a single word. No matter how you’re designing your movie’s world, don’t be afraid to put in that extra bit of effort to let it illuminate your characters inner landscape.

This morbidly surreal sight of an old man wandering the ruins of what might have been his old house, with a chicken as his only witness. There’s so much fractured humanity in this simple image- and I love the way the door shuts back on it after it’s been revealed as it’s caught in the wind. I wonder: Is this a genuine experience in reality, or is Ivan dreaming up an aged vision of himself- so lost after decades of war that all he can do is stagger aimlessly through the rubble of what was once his life and try to piece together shards he no longer has the ability to recognise? It’s a haunting premonition of conflict’s effect on our vulnerable psyche.

In the context of the Second World War, there’s something spine-chillingly eerie about the pride with which the old man states “no stove or chimney will ever burn down”.

This simple motion cut, from the shaky crawl of a car to a patient track through a thick forest. As with all the great films, even small scene transitions are not neglected: Every moment is an opportunity to enrichen the work you’re creating- and here Tarkovsky uses sensory similarity as a means of transition, much like we would in a dream.

The way Tarkovsky throws in this brief, drifting moment of empty space in the middle of a long take to build tension for when the characters return to the screen.

I love the way this character starts running the moment he knows he’s no-longer being watched. The soldier who gave him the news clearly knows how he feels about the girl deep in the forest- but he’s afraid of being judged. And terrified of what he’ll find if he doesn’t get there as fast as possible.

How creepy and intense these close ups are. In the girl’s reverse angle, she’s further from the camera and sharply in focus- but the man’s face seems to melt into the swimming blur of the background, feverishly unpredictable.

Another one of the film’s most iconic images- and like all Tarkovsky’s best it captures a sea of emotions that are impossible to put into words. Quite simply: The frames speak for themselves.

The fantastic crane move that transitions us from that faceless union to this brutal emotional gut-punch as Masha is rendered speechless by what’s just happened.

What a bizarre, disorienting shot to throw into this brilliant scene: Masha staring straight into the lens, blank faced save for a sombre mask. I love the intense paradox of this shot, where we are faced with a character looking directly into our eyes- but she does so with little readable emotion. Are we supposed to project our own feelings onto her- and in doing so try to interrogate the meaning of what we’ve just witnessed? Lastly, this device reminds me of one of my favourite films, Theo Angelopoulos’ ‘The Travelling Players’, in which characters occasionally stare blankly into the lens and deliver monologues- often in contrast to the traumatic events they’ve just been through. I wonder if the seed of that idea started here, in this first gaze.

Yet more stylistic experiments forging bold new innovations: With this sped-up handheld head-rush through the forest that instantly evokes, of all things, the supernatural frenzies of Sam Rami’s ‘Evil Dead’.

The half-frozen stillness the gramophone inspires in these men, who were bickering about their war mere moments before. There’s something in the music, however melodramatic it might be, that reminds them all of a life before the war- and fleetingly transports them back into it.

I’ll always wonder if this experimental sequence of Ivan tossed and turned about a void of his seemingly self-made wartime nightmares was a product of the film’s restricted budget- where they would have been unable to show the horrors we hear in a visual sense. Instead, they creep as pure sound from the shadows of the child’s externalised subconscious- that “twilight room of the soul” Bergman referenced made startlingly real in this bravado scene. From visions of dead soldiers to his own mother, with the incessant chanting of a seething crowd sweeping through the stygian labyrinth, it’s a sequence in which Ivan’s inner world collapses in on itself in a thrillingly confident moment of metaphysics. For a short time, we see what it’s like to exist inside his mind. Whether you’re stunned or baffled- few who see this film will ever forget it.

The haunting image that brings an end to the shelling, with black clouds of eviscerated mud falling through the air and settling in real time as the sulphuric smog blankets the area in an eerie calm. All the more potent for how naturally Tarkovsky lets it linger, it’s a fleeing moment not only of peace- but silence. The image of a flagging crucifix, cast in a wrought iron shape that looks more like the skeleton of military machinery than any divine icon, summons a moment of fear in the face of faith. Have these people been abandoned by this god, who does nothing to stop these horrors except echo in the silence of those last explosions rolling out across the hills? Was he never there to begin with? 

The inverted colours that flip with each strike of lightning during this dream sequence. Ironically, the obvious green-screen makes it all the more magical.

The lavish, inexpressible beauty of this dreamy image: An apple-truck spilling fruit out across the seafront while a group of horses feast on the fallen produce. In my mind there’s no real need to try and interpret imagery like this- and Tarkovsky’s own artistic approach consistently underlined how much he disliked symbolism. An image has its own life- a soul like any other: Impossible to translate in any language except that of its owner’s enigmatic subconscious. This shot, with its sweeping crane down from a wash of leaves to the sandy floor, has always stuck with me as a ravishing example of pure cinema. Free from the shackles of cerebral interpretation, it simply is.

Stunning photography here. After spending much of his youth as an educational delinquent with few great future prospects, in the ‘50s Tarkovsky went along for a year-long research expedition into the Siberian Taiga and while there decided he would become a film-maker. It would be fascinating to read his diaries from that time- but I also wonder if gorgeous silhouette cinematography like this is was influenced by 1960’s sublime ‘Letter Never Sent’, which is itself set on such an expedition.

I love how we refer back to these two hanged corpses from earlier, almost framing them as a morbid audience to the secret scouting mission. It’s a grim portent of the fate that awaits these three if they fail.

The serene silence of these shots gliding across the face of the waters, with the spires of a pitch-dark forest reflected upside-down. It’s a luminously poetic image that Tarkovsky employs at the perfect moment, contemplating the drifting stillness of the death we can only assume has just happened off-screen.

Sometimes all you need is a killer image and a probing question to move the mind. By 1962, we of course already know such a naive hope simply could never come true.

Again, perhaps this was a product of the restricted budget motivating creativity- the scene of German captors marching Ivan off to be hanged is so much more effective when played out in imagined voice-over while images of the now-ruined cells in which he spent his last days haunt the screen.

In the end, I think a big part of Ivan’s Childhood’s lasting impact was its promise to fulfil cinema’s unique potential to allow the metaphysical to intermingle with our perceived reality: Bring our memories flooding back through the rooms we try to shut them out of, under a poetic lens of star-spinning dreams. The film so gracefully treads the borders between fantasy and reality that they seem to become one and the same: A tangled extension of a child’s inner conflict as their vital innocence desperately fights to keep itself alive.

For one last point in this post, I’d love to take this opportunity to recommend a startlingly prescient sister-film to Tarkovsky’s debut: A sorely underseen movie called ‘The White Dove’ by František Vláčil. Vláčil is best known for directing the medieval masterpiece of frenzied pagan poetry that is ‘Marketa Lazarová’- but his first film, released just two years before Ivan’s Childhood, holds striking stylistic resemblances to Tarkovsky’s initial work: Even down to direct comparison to the final image I’ve pictured below. If you like Ivan’s Childhood, I’d emphatically recommend seeking out ‘The White Dove’, as its one of the most luminously magical films I've ever seen and is in dire need of a proper HD restoration to bring out the unbelievable richness of Vláčil's unforgettable imagery. Whether it was an inspiration or not, it makes for a pitch-perfect double-feature with Tarkovsky’s debut delight. Seek it out!