Even before the first frame of his first feature, Tarkovsky
asserts himself as a subversive artist, asserts his total control of sound
and image. The ‘Mosfilm’ statue of two heroic figures appears, arms
thrusting forward into a glorious future of state-approved Soviet cinema -
and we hear a cuckoo cry. It’s one of the few touches of humour in a
harrowing, stark, difficult, but rewarding wartime fable.
Next : Ivan (Kolya
Burlyayev) by a tree, his eyes riveted to a
spider’s web. He moves off, but the camera doesn’t directly follow
him - it rises up the tree, up the thin grey trunk, all the way to the
top, while Ivan retreats the middle distance, at ease in his peaceful,
seductive rural idyll. A fantasy. Soon he wakes to his horrific reality,
as a spy on the devastated Russian/German front. He wades across a
treacherously swampy river to a command post, where he convinces a
skeptical Lieutenant Galtsev (E.Zharikov) that he isn’t just a stray
peasant kid - he’s a key pawn in the vast strategy of war.
Nothing much actually happens: Ivan is told he’s to be sent to
military academy, away from the front; he refuses; female medic Masha (V.Malyavina) spurs the interest of both reserved, youthful Galtsev and
brash, older Holin (V. Zubkov); Holin and Galtsev set out on a dangerous
mission, with Ivan in tow... Tarkovsky places at least as much emphasis on
Ivan’s inner existence - he gives us regular, privileged glimpses
of the boy’s dreams, his memories of a family murdered by the Nazis. It’s
these visions, at once comforting and tormenting, which power his waking
hours, his thirst for revenge.
Adapted from an apparently undistinguished short story by Vladimir
Bogolov, Ivan’s Childhood is in many ways typical of the approved
school of heroic post-war Russian film-making. But Tarkovsky’s ambition is
unmistakeable, as is his disinterest in conventional expectations of
narrative. The ‘action’ is often hard to follow; the Masha subplot, though
striking agreeably touching notes of tentative romance, feels extraneous -
an excuse for Tarkovsky to concoct a unique cinematic embrace as, in a
wintry treescape, Holin pauses as he carries Masha over a trench, his two
feet on either bank, Masha’s dangling in midair, their kiss tantalisingly
invisible above the screen’s upper limit.
Although there was, presumably, nothing ‘holy’ about the
Russians’ ‘Great Patriotic War’, Tarkovsky shoots his movie like a
religious epic. He has the the Russians use a ruined church as their base,
allowing him glimpses of shattered icons looking on as wiry crosses tilt
in the cold, smoky light. There’s the constant implication of (or search
for) some ‘higher’ order behind the chaos of earthy horrors. Ivan’s dreams
reveal the boy’s transcendent relationship with idealised nature -
reality’s wasteland all the more unbearably wrong, as wrong as a
cockerel kept on a leash... As in his later films, Tarkovsky’s poetry is
of fire and water - the soundtrack alternates the sound of dripping rain
with the distant calls of unseen birds.
But whose story is this? If Tarkovsky’s approach to plot is offhand
(and it is), this does open up his film to looser interpretation of
themes. The original story was simply entitled ‘Ivan’ - but Tarkovsky
emphasises the childhood - a previous state - as glimpsed in the
dreams. Though Ivan is ‘about 12,’ war has accelerated his development.
He’s at least the equal of the men we see (it’s no accident he
shares his name with a Major) - which makes Burlyayev’s ferocious
performance all the more remarkable - he’s also incredible in Tarkovsky’s
next film, Andrei Rublev. Ivan thinks nothing of
telling the men what to do, and they, eventually, think nothing, of
following his ‘orders.’ But Ivan’s Childhood is arguably as much
Galtsev’s story. The film begins with Ivan entering Galtsev’s territory -
as the lieutenant sleeps - and the main plot ends with him leaving it. We
then zoom forward to Berlin, with the war won and Galtsev among the ruins
of the Nazi administration. He sees a photograph of Ivan, and the film
ends with a final vision of the lad’s dreams. At the very least, the whole
film is Galtsev’s reminiscence - it’s possibly his fantasy, his idealised
version of a heroic wartime tale, his movie.
And it’s intriguing just how very cinematic Ivan’s dreams
are. Each involves some kind of special effect, some piece of startlingly
innovative camera trickery. In the first, Ivan performs a subtly
gravity-defying crane shot through the trees. Later, he sees himself on
the back of a horse-drawn cart full of apples, and the countryside behind
is developed in negative. These reveries do veer towards the sentimental -
his mother’s brow-wiping gesture is entirely phoney, while the music is
too often heavy-handed and repetitive. But just as you begin to draw back
from Tarkovsky’s rough edges, he delivers a knockout blow. Is there a more
lyrical vision in the whole of cinema, for instance, than then when the
cart spills its impossibly vast load of apples, which spread across the
road, which transforms into a beach, which is then grazed by wild horses,
nuzzling each apple in turn?
From www.jigsawlounge.co.uk
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