Ivan’s Child­hood (1962)

That Andrei Tarkovsky sure knew how to throw a film togeth­er. His 1962 film Ivan’s Child­hood was not made from a stand­ing start, as the direc­tor had been ply­ing his superla­tive trade on var­i­ous col­lab­o­ra­tive shorts and the impres­sive medi­um-length essay on the inter­sec­tion between work and art, The Steam­roller and the Vio­lin, from 1961. Yet this is talked of as a clas­sic debut fea­ture, demon­strat­ing a near-rabid hunger to dis­tort and sub­vert con­ven­tion­al cin­e­mat­ic parlance.

As a cur­ren­cy, film is much cheap­er than it once was, but it means that sim­ple plea­sures have become more pro­nounced and more notice­able. Per­haps its unfair to gauge the film against oth­ers before and since, but Ivan’s Child­hood has the rare abil­i­ty to stop you in your tracks. And it’s less down to the sto­ry­line, con­cern­ing the abject hor­rors of the Russ­ian front dur­ing World War Two as seen through the eyes of the gan­g­ly, blonde title char­ac­ter, but down to the for­mal con­struc­tion itself. You watch a shot and think, ​‘Wow, an immense amount of thought and plan­ning has clear­ly gone into that shot.’ But Tarkovsky, not a man to rest on artis­tic lau­rels, repeats the for­mu­la again, cre­ates anoth­er elab­o­rate shot which forces the view­er to con­sid­er the form as equal to the content.

And as you con­tin­ue to watch, you soon realise that the lit­tle link­ing shots, or con­tex­tu­al asides, or expo­si­tion­al exte­ri­ors, or any­thing which might be used as invis­i­ble glue to bind togeth­er the cen­tral scenes, is sim­ply not there. Every shot is cal­cu­lat­ed to per­fec­tion. Yet ​‘per­fec­tion’ is not the right word to use, as it could refer to aes­thet­ics or fram­ing or the action or the length of the shot. But Tarkovsky – the clever bas­tard – some­how man­ages to locate an equi­lib­ri­um in all of the above. And then, the real coup de cin­e­ma comes when you realise that each shot is designed to enhance those around it, not just as stand-alone set pieces.

Take Ivan’s dream sequence when he recalls the bru­tal death of his moth­er. We segue from a mil­i­tary bunker to a well, fol­low­ing the cam­era as it drift from a sleep­ing Ivan to a mys­te­ri­ous light in the ceil­ing. The sequence of shots begin by exag­ger­at­ing the lov­ing rela­tion­ship between the pair, as they glance down the well and moth­er tells boy to beware of falling down. Then the cam­era appears look­ing up at them though a film of water, per­haps itself hid­ing from some encroach­ing dan­ger. Sud­den­ly Ivan is then in the well, Tarkovsky using the depth of field through a low-angle shot to exag­ger­ate the boy’s safe­ty from what­ev­er is above. The buck­et falls towards the cam­era like a guil­lo­tine. The moth­er screams and water evoca­tive­ly splash­es over her soon-to-be corpse, sig­ni­fy­ing her vio­lent demise. And then we’re back in the bunker.

When you read writ­ing on Tarkovsky, the term ​‘poet’ often aris­es. There’s cer­tain­ly a poet­ry in the life and the peo­ple that he places in front of his lens, but in a sequence such as the one above, there’s poet­ry engrained with­in the very fibres of the frame. There’s a flu­en­cy which is rare, an abil­i­ty to string togeth­er dis­parate, some­times even con­flict­ing expres­sions and show that they can make some­thing beau­ti­ful. Tarkovsky is the ene­my of com­pla­cen­cy, he push­es every image with all his might.

If this film has a prob­lem it might be that the mate­r­i­al is too inti­mate for a direc­tor like Tarkovsky. He is the star here, not lit­tle aveng­ing angel Ivan, played by Niko­lay Burlyaev. The hor­rors of war­fare seem too ple­beian a sub­ject for this film­mak­er, and he would quick­ly under­stand that he need­ed to make sto­ries that felt wor­thy of his for­mal mas­tery. Four years lat­er he would release the exis­ten­tial and spir­i­tu­al mas­ter­work, Andrei Rublev, and con­firm to the world that he was and remains one of the grand-high poets of cinema.