Ivan's Childhood
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| Ivan's Childhood Иваново детство |
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| Directed by | Andrei Tarkovsky |
| Written by | Vladimir Bogomolov |
| Starring | Nikolai Burlyayev |
| Music by | Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov |
| Cinematography | Vadim Yusov |
| Editing by | Lyudmila Feiginova |
| Distributed by | Mosfilm |
| Release date(s) |  6 April 1962 (Moscow premiere) 27 June 1963 |
| Running time | 95 min |
| Country | USSR |
| Language | Russian |
| IMDb profile | |
Ivan's Childhood (Russian: Иваново детство; Ivanovo detstvo) is a Soviet film made in 1962. It has also been released as My Name Is Ivan in the USA. The film was made at Mosfilm by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky. It is based on Vladimir Bogomolov's short story Ivan.
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[edit] Synopsis
The film is centered around a 12 year old Russian boy, Ivan, whose parents died at the hands of Germans invading Russia during the Second World War. In striving single-mindedly to avenge their deaths, he lives the life of a homeless orphan. Sometimes he joins partisans and at other times he is with the Russian Army, but he is always adamant to fight on the front line, and he takes advantage of his small size to get reconnaissance jobs for which grownups would be unsuitable.
Thus, Ivan is both a child deprived of a childhood and an adult with no experience or identity. Therefore he gropes for manhood with no role model, nor any beliefs or standards of his own beyond his already fragmentary memories of a happy boyhood before the War, which we glimpse in very brief but powerful reveries (for which Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov wrote a haunting and dreamy musical score). In this way, through Ivan, Tarkovsky explores adolescence. Yet Ivan's fall from innocence is particularly extreme since his raison d'etre compels him to chase an entity that he is too afraid to define and that would transpire to be a phantom were it anything less than the Third Reich itself. Ivan, passionate yet helpless in an unyielding and dangerous world, exposes himself too often and is doomed to die very young in the captivity of the Nazis by execution.
The lives of soldiers Ivan meets and his surroundings are explored with a scrutiny equal to that of the sensitive Ivan to the extent that the story line diverges from the main completely to consider the romantic life of an officer and his hopeless advances towards an army nurse. Much of the film is set in an army dugout where the officers await orders, fearing death, planning assaults and talking apparent trivia while Ivan impatiently and nervously awaits his next reconnaissance mission.
The final scenes in the film are characteristically intense (see Nostalghia for example). They are, in part, set in Berlin after the war has ended and Berlin is under Soviet occupation. As we follow one of Ivan's former officer friends through the Nazi prison where Ivan was executed we become more aware of the horrors of the place and of the fate of our hero, Ivan. When we reach the execution room, the scene is cut to a flashback of Ivan's childhood.
[edit] Production
Ivan's Childhood was Tarkovsky's first major film (after The Steamroller and the Violin, a student piece). He inherited the project as the aborted attempt of another director. The screenplay was based on a book by Vladimir Bogomolov. Tarkovsky wrote in Sculpting in Time that he did not admire the book, but stories that were not well written were easier to adapt into films.
Ivan is played by Nikolai Burlyayev, whom Tarkovsky met while still at VGIK film school.
[edit] Responses
Tarkovsky himself was not pleased with the film; in his book Sculpting in Time, he criticizes Nikolai Burlyayev, writes at length about subtle changes to certain scenes that he regrets not implementing.
However, the film received numerous awards and international acclaim on its release, winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and attracting the attention of many people, including Ingmar Bergman who said:
- "When I discovered the first films of Tarkovsky, it was a miracle. I suddenly found myself before a door to which I had never had the key…a room which I had always wished to penetrate and wherein he felt perfectly at ease. Someone was able to express what I had always wished to say without knowing how. For me Tarkovsky is the greatest filmmaker."[citation needed]
Jean-Paul Sartre wrote an an article on the film.[1] Filmmaker Sergei Parajanov said: "I did not know how to do anything and I would not have done anything if there had not been Ivan's Childhood".[citation needed] Krzysztof Kieślowski made a similar remark about the film.[citation needed]
However, while the film was admired in the West, it was banned in Russia by Nikita Khrushchev, on the basis that it portrayed a child soldier fighting on the front for the Soviet Union during World War II, which was not considered good for Russia's image (in reality, little boys often did fight on the front lines during the War).[citation needed]
[edit] Connections with other Tarkovsky films
Tarkovsky frequently uses trees as symbols; Ivan's Childhood features a dead tree at the end of the film, and a young sapling at the very beginning, on which hangs a cobweb through which we see Ivan's face in the very first frame. Similarly, in Stalker, the stalker draws an analogy between hardness and resistance and a dying tree and contrasts it to the pliability of a sapling, declaring that that which is hard shall not survive; and in The Sacrifice in which a father and son plant a dead tree in the ground in the hope it will spring to life again.
As in Ivan's Childhood, war is central to many of Tarkovsky's films, including Andrei Rublev, Mirror, and The Sacrifice.
[edit] External links
| Works of Andrei Tarkovsky | |
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| Feature films | Ivan's Childhood • Andrei Rublev • Solaris • Mirror • Stalker • Nostalghia • Voyage in Time (with Tonino Guerra) • The Sacrifice |
| Student films | The Killers • Concentrate • There Will Be No Leave Today • The Steamroller and the Violin |
| Books | Sculpting In Time • Time Within Time: The Diaries 1970-1986 |
| Preceded by Last Year at Marienbad |
Golden Lion winner 1962 tied with Family Diary |
Succeeded by Hands Over the City |
