Ivanovo detstvo
Tags: bleak, anti war, flashback

Plot synopsis:
As the film opens, a 12-year-old boy is running through an open field laughing and strolling in a carefree manner. As he runs around, he encounters his mother and informs her that there is a cuckoo in a tree. The boy, Ivan Bondarev (Nikolay Burlyaev) suddenly wakes up, revealing that the previous scene was a dream. He currently spends his nights in a windmill and leaves the building to explore. The windmill is in the middle of an open field with abandoned farm equipment with smoke swirling around. Next, the boy is wading through marshes and tall grasses as the sun is setting. While he wades through, flares are sent up and he encounters barbed wire. The film cuts to the title screen.A Russian officer wakes up Comrade Senior Lieutenant Galtsev (Yevgeni Zharikov) in the middle of the night because they found a boy crossing the Dnepr River. Ivan, wet and shivering, asks the informer to leave and declares himself Bondarev, asking for Number 51 at headquarters. Galtsev makes the first call and is ridiculed by the man on the phone. When he informs Bondarev that he will need to be locked up, Ivan insists that he calls again and even provides Galtsev with the code address of VCH 49550. When Galtsev gets through Number 51, he is instructed to provide the Ivan with paper and a pen and send him anything that the boy writes down. Galtsev realizes the importance of the boy and follows the orders in addition to providing the boy with food and a bath. Ivan counts pine needs and seeds, displaying a code and seals the envelope for it to be delivered. After, Ivan takes a bath and eats his food before falling asleep.As the sound of water drips in the barrack, Ivan dreams of his mother and himself dropping a feather into a well. During this dream, his mother and he speak of a star that remains in the well. Later, Ivan is in the well reaching for the allusive star as his mother is shot, presumably by German soldiers. Ivan awakes to see that Galtsev is still in the room. Ivan admits to becoming jittery and inquires whether he talks in his sleep. As this conversation ends, Captain Kholin (Valentin Zubkov) enters the room and Ivan and Kholin share a warm, familial embrace. Ivan is informed that Corporal Katasonov is still waiting for him at Hollow Tree but is surrounded by Germans. Ivan informs Kholin that because he is so small, he was able to get away and swim across the river. Kholin is not pleased with this fact, especially because Ivan has lost so much weight; this scene displays how much Kholin cares for Ivan and treats him like a son. At this point, Kholin provides Ivan with clothing.In the next scene, Ivan is informed that he will be sent to military school and disapproves of the decision stating that he must continue to fight the Germans. Because Kholin and Katasonov have taken such a liking to Ivan, the wish to see him succeed and leave the front lines. Due to Ivans disapproval, he runs away to the countryside where he finds an old man (Dmitri Milyutenko). After a few minutes of conversing, a Russian car comes speeding up to retrieve Ivan. Ivan reluctantly returns to the car but threatens that he will continue to run away if they dont send him back across the river. As the car leaves, Ivan leaves a loaf of bread and a can of food for the old man.Later, the film cuts to the nearby forest where Kholin is aggressively pursuing a romantic relationship with Masha (Valentina Malyavina), the doctors assistant. Masha does her best to refuse the advances of the Captain but he forces a kiss and a hug on her. Afterward, as she walks away, an old friend that she took her college entrance exams with stops her. As they are speaking, Kholin, Galtsev, and Katasonov walk by and receive the attention of Masha. Masha leaves her old friend and wanders into the woods.After Ivan spends three days at headquarters, he returns to the barracks where Galtsev tries to give him various magazines to read to occupy his time. Unfortunately, Ivan had already read all of that material during the last three days. Ivan takes interest in an art book. While showing Ivan the art book, Galtsev overhears Kholin and Katasonov making plans to take Ivan on another mission across the Dnepr River. Galtsev offers to join, but they do not need him. Ivan looks through Galtsevs belongings and finds a knife that once belonged to Galtsevs friend. When Ivan asks for the knife, Galtsev reluctantly gives him the weapon.Later, outside the trenches, Galtsev inquires about what will happen to Ivan once the war is over. Kholin informs him that Katasonov or the Colonel will adopt him. The scene cuts to Ivan who sets up a practice hunt of German soldiers in order to avenge his familys murder. During this, a real German air raid begins. Galtsev returns to the barracks where he checks on Ivan, cleans up the room, and is informed by Ivan that he wants to continue to fight.Kholin returns to Ivan later that day and informs Ivan that Katasonov was sent back to headquarters before he could say goodbye to Ivan. Instead, Ivan will be accompanied by Kholin and Galtsev across the river. The three eat dinner and Ivan falls asleep. During this time, he dreams of the time when he rode atop an apple truck with his sister in the rain as the truck drove onto the beach. As the apples fall out of the truck on the beach, horses eat the fallen apples, and Ivan and his sister enjoy the rain on their skin. During this dream, Kholin wakes Ivan in order to get ready for the night. While getting ready, Ivan expresses his anger that Katasonov did not visit him prior to his departure. The three get dressed and prepare to leave to cross the river. Kholin advises Galtsev to make a diversion while he and Ivan get to the boat. While making the diversion, Galtsev discovers that Katasonov was shot and they are hiding it from Ivan.Kholin, Ivan, and Galtsev row across the Dnepr River, wade through the marshes, and eventually say their goodbyes as Ivan must begin his crossing. Once Ivan left, Kholin and Galtsev row back across the river, meet some artillery fire, but get back safely to the barracks. Once there, they play the gramophone only to be interrupted by Masha as she says goodbye to Galtsev.Later, the scene is in Berlin after Russia has won the war. As troops sift through the paperwork, a scarred and war-torn Galtsev finds Ivans file and discovers that he was captured and executed. The film ends with Ivans last dream when his mother leaves him to play with other children on the beach and he chases his sister through the water.

Review: As I said before the film uses many ellipses to show Ivan's fractured life - he plays in the fields, his mother calls him and smiles; a water well, he stares down at the water and his mother stands beside him and tells a story about the stars; we hear a gun shot, someone lying on the grass; Ivan is wading through a swamp to reach a soviet army unit.The war is not shown at all - it is suggested.
I would call it much more an intimist film, somewhat in the vein of "Les Jeux Interdits", but Ivan's childhood was over after the horrors he had to go through; his only way to survive as a human being was to fight the horror that had crippled his life, while the children of "Les Jeux Interdits" went on with their children games in spite of the war.
His use of black and white stock in terms of lighting is exemplary.The film's title is ironic as Ivan does not have a childhood, but the films majestic and moving final shot suggests that Ivan does receive a kind of immortality beyond the bleak finality of his discovered photo in Berlin, that the Russian spirit itself cannot be stifled and will ultimately run free..
(***** out of *****)Ivan's Childhood is Tarkovsky's debut feature film about a 12 year old boy who volunteers to fight in the front lines against the German invasion because his family where murdered by Nazis.
This motion picture is one of the most stunning independent movies you will ever see.Sometimes Ivan cries like the child he is but this is not because of the burden of war but because he can not do what he wants most - to avenge the death of his family.
This film by Tarkovsky depicts the story of Ivan, a child partisan in the eastern front during the second world war.
Ivan's Childhood, Andrei Tarkovsky's first substantial feature as director (he previously made a short of the Killers, and a 45 minute student film), is a near-masterpiece of adolescence shredded to pieces in subjective perception.
It's set in world war 2, with 12 year old Ivan's family killed by the Nazis and his alliance with the Russian soldiers as a scout able to sneak past into small spaces more to do with vengeance than real patriotism.
By the time we see him he's a torn figure, someone who at 12 looks and acts like he's already come of age, by force, and that this deep down has left him in a disparaging state of mind, pushing it away through temper (he won't go to military school, he tells his superiors), and only with the slightest escape through dreams.
One sees in this the only spots of innocence left in Ivan's life, the pinnacle (and one of Tarkovsky's most breathtaking scenes ever filmed) the final dream on the beach with Ivan and his sister running along the sand.
It's this wild meddling with what Ivan sees or experiences or thinks and secretly fears through his would-be tough exterior that makes him so compelling and heartbreaking, as played by Kolya Burlyayev with a sharp level of bravery- not even Jean-Pierre Leaud was this absorbing, albeit on different dramatic terrain.It's a given that it was not Tarkovsky's project to start with, and, ala Kubrick and Spartacus, came in after a director had been let go to finish the picture.
While it is remarkable to see how Tarkovsky does make it his vision, and quite an ambitious one considering how expansive the production design gets and the technical daring taken with his director of photography Vadim Yusov, and how there's a fresh and often original (eg dream scenes, placement of the camera, the scene in the post-war house looking at the records of the departed) perspective that no one else would have given it, there are small parts of the story that could have been dealt with a little better, edited, or cut out altogether.
The character of Masha (played practically with one expression- practically cause of the moment after she is kissed- on her face) is a little unnecessary, or rather more of a means for Tarkovsky to practice some technical ideas in the forest scene, which really leads nowhere, and how her reemergence later in the film also doesn't serve much of a purpose.
Maybe there's a point to be made about women in the army at the time, as she's an object of desire less much of an effective nurse, but when seeing her scenes (which aren't bad exactly) one wants to get back to Ivan and the central plot.But, as mentioned, one has to know that as a Tarkovsky picture what doesn't work doesn't matter so much as what does, and Ivan's Childhood is often staggering in its depiction of the brutality on the mind and consciousness, not just through Ivan but through his adult counterparts, and about how in a time when life can be taken away in an instant, almost without a sound, clinging to a past, however surreal, is all that can matter.
Its main theme is of childhood innocence lost (becoming accessible to Ivan only in dreams) however the young officers are also vastly aged by the conflict they find themselves in.The backdrop is nature itself - woodpeckers and cuckoos emulate (or become replaced by) the sounds of machine gun fire and the hoots of the falling flares.
But nature's power is continually challenged by the great war going on around it and is ultimately defiled and devastated (like Ivan's, and the other young officers' innocence) - turning from green grasslands to mud and ashen trees.Reminded me of 'The Thin Red Line' in its use of the natural world war tries to ignore.
But with Andrei Rublev, Tarkovsky created one of the best films ever made, a label that Ivan's Childhood is not likely to ever receive.
The uneasy state of the Russian army, facing the German front across wetlands, is reflected in the characters - the boy and the men are getting 'jittery' - and the destruction waged on the landscape reflects the damage done to the people themselves: the old man with his cockerel and, especially, Ivan, who slips between the dreams of sleep and the nightmare of living.
This film is a story about a 12 year old boy Ivan, who happened to spend his childhood within the world of Great Patriotic War. He wasn't supposed to be a part of such a cruel occurrence as war, but having lost parents, chose to help his companions-in-arms in risky and crucial way.
So I think Andrei Tarkovsky made a great and strong film showing all horror and gore of war in a different style.
IVAN'S CHILDHOOD is a masterful black and white work in which Andrei Tarkovsky demonstrates a complete command of stylistic improvisation, visual experimentation and complex use of symbolism.
Using a fractured narrative structure, Andrei Tarkovsky's first feature film concerns the titular orphan and his experiences as a scout on the Soviet Eastern Front.The film sidesteps the potential sentimentality of its premise (a definite risk given the presence of prominent father and brother figures) by using the situation to ask greater questions about the nature of war.
Not simply because a film like Ivan's Childhood (a perfect title, by the way) is so multi-layered, metaphorical, psychologically complex, eerie, strange and moving – but because all those ARTISTIC elements combine to form a highly ENTERTAINING film, thus making a nonsense of the notion that European "art" film exists to be admired but not enjoyed.
Like most films of Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, My Name is Ivan (a.k.a. Ivan's Childhood), reaches out to the spirit within us.
Based on a short story titled "Ivan" by the Russian author Vladimir Bogomolov, My Name is Ivan is a bleak but deeply moving film about a 12-year old boy whose parents and sister were killed by the Germans and is now a scout (spy) for a Red Army battalion.
Alternating between idyllic dreams of childhood, nightmares of revenge, and scenes of war devastation, Tarkovsky creates a uniquely personal exploration of the effects of war on the mind and spirit.
Despite the officers' objections, Ivan is sent on another covert operation.Tarkovsky shows us war but without bombs or glory or battle scenes -- only the suffering spirit of a child devastated by loss.
I always conceptualized Ivan as a destroyed personality pushed by the war from the normal axis of development." Though an early film, Ivan presages Tarkovsky's later work with the use of hallucinatory camera work and very long takes where nothing happens for several minutes.
At times he gets sudden aggressive bursts of hatred and moments of juvenile joy, when he forgets that he is a soldier.The poetic narrative of Ivan's Childhood is both classic and modern, Tarkovsky's style is strong, classical but on the other hand he modernizes cinematic poetry and creates something completely new and original.
As Tarkovsky realistically portrays the horrors of war, he paradoxically finds something poetic and beautiful in its all cruelty.Ivan's Childhood is a cruel and honest film.
The story could've easily been juvenile and conventional but not in this case where Tarkovsky created an extremely original film about war in the eyes of a 12-year-old.
It isn't a Tarkovsky film without memorable scenes and images and Ivan's Childhood has those certainly, the dream sequences make the film(i.e. Ivan and his sister on the apple cart in the rain) but standing out too are the magical birch forest scene, the emotionally harrowing scene in the dark house and especially one of the most heart-breakingly powerful endings ever.
What's remarkable is that while the story sounds simple, there are several characteristic Tarkovsky themes for so early on his career and when it comes to mood Ivan's Childhood works amazingly.Furthermore the story of Ivan's Childhood is incredibly touching, the childhood scenes are the epitome of innocence in a heartfelt, sometimes entertaining and charming way and in complete contrast(without feeling like two different films) the effect of the war and combat is both grotesque and poetic.
IVAN'S CHILDHOOD, released in 1962, was Soviet director's Andrei Tarkovsky first feature film.
An adaptation of a short story by Vladimir Bogomolov set in World War II, its protagonist is a 12 year-old orphan (Nikolai Burlyaev) on the Eastern Front whose small size allows him to scout German positions undetected.
A subplot involves Kholin's disturbing attempts to seduce Nurse Masha (Valentina Malyavina) and, in stark contrast to earlier Soviet treatments of the war, suggest that in wartime one's own fellow soldiers can just as dangerous as the enemy.As far as Tarkovsky films go, IVAN'S CHILDHOOD is still an immature work.
There are almost no Germans at all in the entire film, but the Germans as a group possess a very menacing presence, communicated by the Russians constant fear of an offensive.Ivan is a 12 year old boy whose mother, father, and sister have all been killed by the Nazis, and he is working as a scout for the Soviet army.
It is made clear several times that Ivan is determined to seek revenge for the deaths of his family members, often seeming to refer to Hitler himself.One of the main messages of the film deals with the brutality of war and the fact that it is just as dangerous to women and children as it is to soldiers.
It is the story of a twelve year old boy in the war who is already stuck in it, doesn't want to be sent to safety in a military school but insists on continuing risking his life as a scout against the wishes of his grown up friends among the militaries - there are two women in the film, one is his mother as he sees her in his dream sequences, a paradise in contrast to the hell on earth in the war, and the other is a soldier woman who is presence is almost equally lyrical, both connected with pristine nature.
Russian master Andrei Tarkovsky, making his feature debut, was keen to explore this idea in Ivan's Childhood, and the result was a work of art that can sit alongside the likes of Come and See and Grave of the Fireflies as one of the finest films to take this approach.
But Ivan, after watching his family murdered before him, burns with the desire for revenge, revealing that if he is sent away he will only escape and join the local partisans.Like all of Tarkovsky's work, there isn't really a definitive plot driving Ivan's Childhood.
Instead, Tarkovsky uses the characters and setting as a means to explore deeper themes, like war, fear, rage, loss and, of course, childhood.
At the end, Tarkovsky leaves us haunted by images of endless death and pointless savagery, making Ivan's Childhood one of the most devastating anti-war pictures ever made..
Somewhat ironically titled, this Andrei Tarkovsky war drama is about the protagonist's lack of a real childhood; orphaned during World War II, he spends his days running errands for Soviet soldiers to avoid being sent to school, however, dreams and nightmares of his prewar life frequently haunt him.
Tarkovsky said that children understood his films better than adults.After watching Ivan's Childhood, I can agree to some degree with that statement.Ivan's Childhood is not so much about war, but it's about the troubled mind of a child.
What makes this even more impressive is that this is Andrei Tarkovsky first major film and we already got our first taste of Tarkovsky haunting vision.Nikolai Burlyayev is one of the best child actors I've ever seen in a movie.
There is just something so touching about the final scene, that despite knowing that Ivan has been killed during war, he must have reached the place of his childhood in the end.
"Ivan's Childhood" is a sad story, but an excellent film by Tarkovsky, as he uses his exceptional talent of memories to convey loss and rejuvenation.
The film features a non-linear plot with frequent flashbacks.After a brief dream sequence, Ivan Bondarev (Nikolai Burlyayev), a 12- year-old Russian boy, wakes up and crosses a war-torn landscape to a swamp, then swims across a river.
At the age of 30, Tarkovsky extraordinarily implements his stupefying aesthetic tack to the hilt, the film can sweep any new audience off their feet tout court, and sends out a biting anti-war message with soul- pulverizing poignancy.WWII, Eastern front, our hero is a 12-year-old scrawny Russian boy Ivan (Burlyaev), who is left bereft and hell-bent in his reconnaissance vocation urged by an inexorable impulse of avenging, the front-line is not a place for child, Colonel Gryaznov (Grinko) intends to send him to a military school (and adopt him when the war is over), but Ivan is already a fearless soldier in defiance of his gaunt figure, after having prematurely experienced a baptism of fire out of man-made atrocity, which entirely traumatizes his child-like innocence, there is no propaganda whitewashing in his characterization, he is brusque to his senior comrades, reckless in his intent to stay on, and holds a skeptical world-view jarringly incommensurate with his age.
Andrei Tarkovksy's first feature film (excluding his shorts), about a boy named Ivan (Nikolai Burlyayev) working behind enemy lines as a military spy during World War II after being made an orphan by the Germans, is his most conventional film, though that hardly makes the film a conventional war movie.
It includes a non linear narrative, dream sequences, documentary footage of the battle of Berlin, and many poetic images, mostly of Russian nature or of the pre war Ivan playing with his now dead mother (the remarkable black and white cinematography was by Vadim Yusov).
Since the carnage of war is only suggested (which was obviously intentional on Tarkovsky's part not to show any overt clashes between Germans and Russians), he was forced to fall back on the conflict between the Soviet soldiers and their 12 year old charge, the jaded Ivan.
He uses this footage to work in a scene where one of Ivan's soldier friend discovers the boy's ultimate fate (executed by the Nazis, by beheading!).Ultimately, the message of a poor 12 year old orphan caught up in the horrors of war fails to have the shattering impact that most critics insist that it does.
'Ivan's Childhood' was the Russian master Andrei Tarkovsky's first feature film.
'Ivan's Childhood' is an example of a film which questioned war and had a sympathetic view of the people devastated by war.Tarkovsky is a true auteur of cinema.
Andrei Tarkovsky's "Ivan's Childhood" is a humanist film in which the atrocious realities of war are portrayed through narrative of an adolescent protagonist, Ivan.
IVAN'S CHILDHOOD is the third film I've seen from acclaimed Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, and the third I haven't liked.
"Ivan's Childhood" feels like a propaganda film.
Andrei Tarkovsky started his career the right way with his debut feature "Ivan's Childhood"; a dark, poetic, and beautiful portrait of a youth who grew up during war-time.
Given that 'Ivan's Childhood (1962)' was initiated by other artists, one gets the sense that perhaps Tarkovsky's heart wasn't entirely in this one  it feels like a substantially less-personal film than 'Andrei Rublev (1969)' or 'Stalker (1979),' the other two I've seen so far.
Perhaps it'll prove the least durable of Tarkovsky's efforts, but, for now, I have to say that I adored every moment.The loss of childhood innocence is a common motif in war-themed pictures, and seems particularly prevalent in Soviet cinema  for the finest example, look towards than Elem Klimov's harrowing 'Come and See (1985).' In this film, a close forerunner, Nikolay Burlyaev plays Ivan, a twelve-year-old orphan employed as a Russian spy on the Eastern Front.
This is director Andrei Tarkovsky's first film and is about Ivan who is an orphaned Russian pre-teen who is personally driven to do reconnaissance for his country during WWII.
"Ivan's Childhood" tells the story of a 12 year old who tries to help with the war effort after his family are killed by Nazi's.