Andrei Tarkovsky’s directorial debut, Ivan’s Childhood (1962), is perhaps his most experimental and personal cinematic achievement that would define his approach to the medium. Throughout, he portrays an elusive yet sober visualisation of the impact of war. With its strategic cinematography and metaphysical narrative, Tarkovsky subtly meditates on the psychological damage of World War II through the subjectivity of the young protagonist, Ivan (Nikolai Burlyayev).
Ivan guides the camera through marshy landscapes, antagonistic counterparts, and existential realities while attempting to salvage his lost childhood. The twelve-year-old is situated right in the middle of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union; a child who has already experienced the death of his family. Working as a frontline scout with a partisan force, he appears skinny and innocent, yet his demeanour is hard-boiled and bullish. He asserts his small presence on his fellow soldiers, demanding he be treated as an equal. The majority of the film takes place between his risky reconnaissance missions into enemy territory and cryptic dreams that recall a time before the war.
Premiering after the death of Stalin, Ivan’s Childhood signals a shift towards a form of cinematic experimentation influenced by the legacy of avant-garde. The thaw era allowed many directors the explosive expression that lacked momentum throughout Stalin’s reign. Tarkovsky dug deep inside himself to translate what became known in the Soviet Union as the Great Patriotic War through an anti-socialist realism. The film was released in a time when the Soviet Union was beginning to see new talent emerge that broke with earlier war-themed pictures such as Mikhail Chiaurelli’s Fall of Berlin (1949). No longer was the conflict depicted through a patriotic lens that upheld the brilliant leadership of Stalin. Instead, directors like Tarkovsky, Mikhail Kalatozov and Grigori Chukhrai focused on introspective ordeals that revealed the crippling mental anguish of the war.
The first main point of departure for Ivan’s Childhood is its use of dream sequences that transcend the dark gritty surroundings that engulf Ivan. The narrative blurs the conscious and subconscious to leave the viewer pondering Ivan’s fate. The viewer encounters this as early as the opening scene. Exposed to Ivan’s erratic mental capacity, it is questions of childhood fantasy and imagination that dictate the first five minutes. During this subconscious encounter Ivan experiences the sensation of flying. As a cinematic technique that was starved under the reign of Stalin, the dream sequence delves into the complexity of child psychology, including the Freudian interpretation of flying as part of early childhood wish-fulfilment. In the first few moments, Tarkovsky’s camera — helmed by cinematographer Vadim Yusov — explores Ivan’s most cherished visions of his mother.
Tarkovsky and Yusov even chose to frame the very first shot through a symbolic visual motif. Ivan’s position central within the cobweb signifies his splintered reality. Recurring later when Ivan encounters the old man, this motif implies both his individual fragility and the incompleteness of a child’s perception. The child’s role in the film is to both recall the memory of an idealist lost time and as a witness of war. Ivan, with his generic Russian name, can be seen as a microcosm of all children and their fate during World War II. He is an embodiment of a generation attempting to recover their childhood, a time in which approximately 1.3 million Soviet children were killed.
Tarkovsky’s motifs are more precisely punctuated by the temporality within each shot. Rejecting the idea of montage as practiced by the Soviet school, mostly popularised by Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein, Tarkovsky revelled in the idea of “sculpting in time.” For him, cinema allowed for distinctive currents and fluctuations of time through the shot’s internal rhythm. This became known as rhythmical aestheticism, which distorts our sense of time through principles he coined himself such as “time-pressure” and “time-thrust.” Against the structured cutting of montage, he wanted to explore how time flows in the shot: its paces, tensions, and pressures.
Tarkovsky’s measurements of time exist inside the temporal dimensions of the shot. The philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, described this pressure as exerting variable flows of time, or to make visible relationships of time which cannot be reduced to the present. In Ivan’s Childhood, the faster the pace of the scene the more it creates a chaotic picture that parallels the war. In contrast, slowing down the scene’s rhythm gives the audience the chance to reflect on Ivan’s personality. The two together capture Ivan’s struggle through a capricious material world, one that produces spontaneous tempos to match the unpredictability of himself and his exterior environment. When Ivan is behind enemy lines, for example, he grapples through a swamp’s current, being attacked both physically and mentally by his surroundings. Performing a tracking shot, the camera claws alongside him, attempting to keep up. As Ivan fights with both the material and unconscious world, so does the viewer, constantly questioning their role in the film.
Tarkovsky’s “sculpting in time” is even more poignant in the second dream sequence involving an overflowing applecart. This time repetitions are used to intensify his anti-war principles. The young girl’s face pans across the screen and returns on the other side three times. She acts as a physical representation of how war destroys childhood — recurring happy, content, and then sad with her surroundings. Tarkovsky begins to evoke a Nietzschean feel, forcing an image of the eternal return. The future in Ivan’s Childhood has become inseparable from the recurrence of destruction. Tarkovsky’s picture calculates its pessimistic message of the unavoidability of war, and Ivan, like millions of children, has inherited the inescapable experience of the sufferer.
This technique of framing characters and objects to stand as symbols of destruction builds throughout. In terms of objects, Tarkovsky brings various trees into focus to challenge the viewer’s basic empathy. The duality of war-time Russia and childhood innocence is occasionally interrupted by an essence of nature and mysticism that surrounds the young protagonist. From first shot to last, dream to reality, perceptions of tangible nature are blurred and lost within the turmoil of war. In a scene separate from Ivan’s story, a birch tree grove pulls the narrative away from the physicality of wartime Russia by panning across the quiet, eloquent scenery. Scenes such as this one find Tarkovsky relapsing back to an idyllic lost utopia divorced from the plague of war.
Nature is more often captured in Ivan’s Childhood with a biblical aura, finding room for both innocence and corruption. In the final dream sequence following the death of the young protagonist, Ivan plays with his friends while overshadowed by the dying charred tree that blemishes his utopia. Tarkovsky even hints at its correlation to the Tree of Knowledge, accumulating the good and bad life of the young protagonist. The end of Ivan’s voyage culminates in a paradise which is simultaneously realised and lost. Resembling that of the newly created Adam, he discovers and plays with nature, but in the real world he is robbed of his Eden. We are left to depart the film with a tracking shot of the tree of good and evil that has made mortal beings. The final images of life and death, substantiated by Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov’s solemnly playful score, forces us into one last contemplation of human morality. These references to the fall of man – temptation also allegorical in the earlier apple cart scene – show Tarkovsky juxtaposing blind disobedience with a chastened intelligence.
The intimacy of Ivan’s Childhood is driven by Tarkovsky projecting his own experience of war onto the character of Ivan. Much like Ivan himself, Tarkovsky experienced his childhood during the war. He recalled that much of the scenery is drawn directly from his private memories. The landscape in the final dream sequence, the cart overflowing with apples and the birch grove are all extracted from his past. Even the opening line from Ivan’s dream, “mother, there’s a cuckoo,” is described by him as one of his earliest childhood recollections. One’s upbringing, for Tarkovsky, is the single most important time in life, and he would often recite that “the most beautiful memories are those of childhood.” Tainted by the devastation he lived through, Tarkovsky declared that “true childhood was the time before the war; war-time froze the heart, obscured the vision and damaged the child irreparably.”
In the figure of Ivan, Tarkovsky asserts a nostalgic longing for a romantic past; one of childhood dreams when family and happiness were intact. He conveys his most personal memories through Ivan’s eyes, fashioning images that are caught between reality and suffering. He then takes these manifestations, constructs a world around them, and makes one young boy stand for the lost dreams of a generation.
Looking at Tarkovsky’s own past one begins to see the deep-rooted pessimism of Ivan’s Childhood. To grasp the film’s message, Tarkovsky forces on us the tragedy of history — history as an endless struggle towards the liberation from war. In a similar vein, philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that Ivan “is radically what the history has made of him,” and he is “entirely made for war…he could no longer live in peace.” Indeed, Ivan’s dreams take on a more collective significance with the child representing “a hallucination for others.” Like Ivan’s consciousness, historical events become lost, all drawing lineage to the repercussions of war. Tarkovsky’s approach to shooting a war film, similar to the historical process, demands heroes like Ivan. However, he goes one step further. War “creates them and destroys them by rendering them incapable of living without suffering in the society they have contributed to forge.” For Sartre, the ambiguity of war shows Ivan as both a “monster” and a “little hero,” tender and courageous, innocent and guilty, young and mature.
The historical impact of Tarkovsky’s anti-war directorial debut is clear to see. The cinematography alone enchants and disturbs, constantly increasing and reducing the tempo to produce a visual maelstrom that mirrors Ivan’s existence. At the same time, Tarkovsky’s tendency to leave behind symbolic visual motifs, littered throughout Ivan’s voyage, highlights his attempt to find some escape in a world that is regurgitating pain and suffering. The application of dreams knitted together with reality is Tarkovsky’s introspective toolkit to pose questions that are innate to our everyday lives. Ultimately, what Tarkovsky created was the first example of his sculpting in time. Refining this through unique time-distortion methods and his long-take minimal cutting reinforced his message that war not only occurs in reality, but it destroys our most intimate dreams.
