Left Field Cinema

For those unfamiliar with the works of Andrei Tarkovsky it might be a pleasant surprise to learn that his feature film debut is actually an excellent starting point as it is easily one of his most accessible films, and one which keeps its feet grounded in reality to a greater extent than his later works.

Tarkovsky was a film maker in the Soviet Union, who in spite of his intense desire to write and direct films only ever managed to finish seven major works in a twenty-five year career. He can not conventionally be considered a prolific filmmaker, but his smaller than average catalogue of work is not due to a Terrance Malick style retreat from his medium, or a Stanley Kubrick level of vigilant perfectionism (although Tarkovsky was also notoriously picky down to the tiniest of details). For Tarkovsky it is almost entirely a result of his environment and the many forces that stood against him, his unique style and his almost always excellent content. But in 1962, the future was there for the taking, and an opportunity would present itself to Tarkovsky which he would take and that ultimately lead him to his final film The Sacrifice in Sweden 1986.

Ivan’s Childhood is a war film. Based on a book written by Vladimir Bogomolov, Tarkovsky himself stated that the book was too dictatorial for his tastes: “Events were related in a deliberately restrained style, almost in the tone of a report. I could not have transferred such a style to the screen, it would have been against my principles.” But he also admitted that Bogomolov’s work did make for great adaptations to film. The story follows a twelve year old boy, the titular Ivan, who has been forced to grow-up extremely fast when his childhood is interrupted by World War II he is orphaned and then adopted (or recruited depending on how romantic your mentality is) by the soviet military and is used to as a spy on the front lines as he crosses to the other side undetected to gather information on the Nazi forces.

When comparing Ivan’s Childhood to other war films and merely as a genre piece, the film finds a much softer appraisal than when comparing it to Tarkovsky’s other films. If you’re of the belief that war films should on some level explore the notion innocence lost then Ivan’s Childhood is perfectly constructed, in fact there are very few examples of other war films that have managed to so effectively capitalise on the theme, Come and See being another example.

At the start of production Eduard Abalov was slated to direct, he had already spent a massive portion of the budget when the producers decided that his out put to this point was of a remarkably low quality, thus he was fired. Tarkovsky was then appointed as director and felt that none of the footage shot by that point was up to scratch, he scrapped the lot and began with a clean slate attempted to make the best of a bad situation, in this sense Ivan’s Childhood (like most of Tarkovsky’s soviet work) is an exercise in resourceful film making, using what little was available the production managed to make great use of the distinctive white trees, a derelict building became a singular location for the film climax on victory day in Berlin, and a marsh land was also put to effective employment as way past the eastern front defences using sound and reflections to imply the battles taking place in the vicinity. Tarkovsky took these locations and created a series of haunting and distinctive images: All that remains of a bombed house is a door that leads to nowhere, a couples embrace straddling a trench below, the young woman is stopped from falling into it by her lovers grip, thousands of pieces of Nazi paperwork floating through the aforementioned derelict building (similar scenes were also used in Downfall), and the final image of the film a single dead tree alone on a beach. It is a visually distinctive film and has the beginnings of the visual flare which Tarkovsky would later be known for. Generally it’s far rawer and features both abrasive editing and music cues, and using hand-held camera work; from his sophomore feature Andrei Rublev and beyond Tarkovsky’s work would find a far greater refinement.

At this point in his career Tarkovsky believed that monochrome was the only true, choice in a film maker’s arsenal of stylistic options. Indeed he was mercilessly clear on the point, stating that shooting in colour only distracted the director, forcing them to examine too closely the types of colours and how they blend together where as in black and white the director can see reality clearly, and this is what he or she should be truly concentrating on. Interestingly enough Ivan’s Childhood is the only one of his films which remained entirely faithful to this ethos. Andrei Rublev is almost entirely black and white with a brief section in colour in the last episode of the film, but every film there after would be a mix of colour and sepia; perhaps Mosfilm wouldn’t allow him to continue making films in such an antiquated style for fear of repelling audiences or maybe he altered his ideas.

Typically of Tarkovsky the man began and ever remained a traditional script writers worst nightmare, his adaptation of the source novel remains relatively faithful to the narrative, but chooses a completely different style, however he did find elements of Bogomolov’s work quite excellent as he commented on the novel in his book Sculpting Time: “This austere war tale was not about violent military clashes, or the ins and outs of reversals at the front. Accounts of exploits were missing. The stuff of the narrative was not the heroics of reconnaissance operations, but the interval between the two missions. The author had charged this interval with a disturbing, pent-up intensity reminiscent of the cramped tension of a coiled spring that has been tightened to the limit.” This part of the narrative remained the same in the film and it was one that Tarkovsky felt the need to captialise on: “In a non-developing, constant state of tension, passions reach the highest possible pitch, and manifest themselves more vividly and convincingly than in a gradual process of change. It is this predilection of mine that makes me so fond of Dostoievsky. For me the most interesting characters are outwardly static, but inwardly charged with energy by an overriding passion.” This is fairly clear as the films narrative continued as it would basically set the stage for most of the protagonists he would examine during his career. However it is never very clear who the protagonist is? Is it Ivan? Ivan is absent from most of the second half of the film as his superior officers wait for him to return. Is it Gryaznov or one of the other officers? Kholin? His character has a large subplot about his hopeless and pointless flirtations with the army nurse Masha. Well they’re all too passive for it to be any of them, and their story arcs are secondary. As a solitary leading role none of the characters fit the bill, this can be seen as one of the major flaws of Ivan’s Childhood. Its switching perspectives kills the drama, but luckily it never really kills the tension; the audience is forced to wait for news of Ivan’s fate with a total lack of information.

Unlike other filmmakers who peak on their debut, Tarkovsky most certainly didn’t. Tarkovsky had found that his first film was his most conventional and thus one that he was less happy with. It was the only one of his films to be used in a 1980 retrospective of 60 years of Soviet cinema. In Tarkovsky’s diary for that year the implication is disdain for the presence of Ivan’s Childhood over the others because of this fact. Tarkovsky actually saw it as his qualifying examination more than anything, more of a preparatory step towards his first true film. It is his most conventional, and his shortest film as well which goes a long way towards making it his most accessible. But despite this, other excellent filmmakers including, Sergei Parajanov and Krysztof Kieslowski have had nothing but praise for the film and often cited it as a powerful influence on them. Possibly the films greatest praise comes from Ingmar Bergman: “My discovery of Tarkovsky’s first film was like a miracle. Suddenly, I found myself standing at the 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.”

Upon competition the film met with problems in censorship, and was eventually banned by the authorities. The worry was that the portrayal of young Ivan fighting in WWII was not the sort of image their propaganda machine wanted to be displaying. The reversal to this is that if they’d truly paid any attention to the film then they’d have seen a far more positive portrayal of Soviet Russia. At no point is Ivan forced to do anything, and in fact the other officers try to have him sent to Military school, and idea which Ivan hates because he wants to fight the Nazi’s to avenge the death of his family. This is an uplifting and almost patriotic view that only the most cynical politician could see as anything other than a true portrayal of a unified Russia, right down to the youngest of children. This is a remarkable act of sabotage on the part of the authorities, strangling itself in for their propagandistic mindset, as always blinded by the surface reflections of their fears and very rarely seeing the truth hidden beneath.

M.Dawson