Ivan's Childhood
1962
Visionary Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky's first film, MY NAME IS IVAN, is a powerhouse of visual and emotional impact and a portend of many themes Tarkovsky would develop throughout his legendary career. Ivan (Nikolai Burlyayev) is a 12-year-old boy roaming the destroyed landscapes of World War II Russia along the German .. Read more
| Starring | Kolya Burlaev, Valentin Zubkov, Yevgeni Zharikov |
|---|---|
| Director | Andrei Tarkovsky |
| Genres | Drama, World Cinema |
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Ivan's Childhood
Visionary Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky's first film, MY NAME IS IVAN, is a powerhouse of visual and emotional impact and a portend of many themes Tarkovsky would develop throughout his legendary career. Ivan (Nikolai Burlyayev) is a 12-year-old boy roaming the destroyed landscapes of World War II Russia along the German front. Between Ivan's ecstatic dreams of his missing family and his mud-and-blood-encrusted reality, the viewer learns that Ivan's father, mother, and sister were killed by Germans and that since then he has gone into service as an intelligence scout for the Russian army.
Ivan's shocking bloodthirsty hunger for revenge is juxtaposed with the innocence and earthbound lyricism of his dreams and memories, creating a portrait of a stolen childhood and a bleak future. Protected and loved by his makeshift family of stoic army officers, Ivan resists being taken out of the army and forces his way back into another scouting mission, putting himself directly in the line of fire. Tarkovsky underscores this wartime drama with a compelling poetic vision through the use of evocative black-and-white cinematography as well as stunning sound and production design. Each element plays a significant part in this brilliant film, based on Vladimir Bogomolov's novel IVAN.
| Starring | Kolya Burlaev, Valentin Zubkov, Yevgeni Zharikov |
|---|---|
| Director | Andrei Tarkovsky |
| Studio | ARTIFICIAL EYE |
| Run time | DVD: 1 hr 31 mins |
| Certificate | |
| Genres | Drama, World Cinema |
| Language | Russian |
| Subtitles | English |
| Released | DVD: 26 Aug 2002 Production year: 1962 |
| Format | DVD |
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Critics' reviews (2)
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Winner of the Golden Lion at Venice, Andrei Tarkovsky's debut feature — about a 12-year-old boy (Kolya Burlyaev) who becomes a spy to take revenge on the Nazis who killed his family — may surprise those familiar only with his later philosophical treatises. The film would be indistinguishable from many other examples of Soviet socialist realism, were it not for the chilling clarity of Vadim Yusov's photography and the visual flourishes that decorate the action (slow motion sequences and the expressionist use of landscape). Even without these elements, however, this is still a shrewd insight into the reckless courage of youth and the grotesque poetry of combat.
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Tarkovsky's first feature is in many ways an orthodox Russian film of its period. Ivan is a teenage Soviet spy on the... read more on Time Out
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Most helpful member's review
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8 out of 8 people found this review helpful
[Highly rated reviewer]
Russian cinema has produced two masters of the medium in my view: Sergei Eisenstein and Andrei Tarkovsky. The rest is a barren desert of mediocre and uninteresting work. It's extraordinary to think that this is a first film so rich and mature is it in all aspects of cinema: the story, direction, acting and production all gel to produce a masterwork. While all the horror of war is portrayed without sensationalisation the humanity of a struggling people shines through. It is dismaying to think that the fate of many small boys in Russia in the Second World War is repeated today in the Middle East and Iraq. It is the ordinary people that suffer most in these conflicts. When will we learn to live at peace with each other.
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Most recent members' review
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2 out of 2 people found this review helpful
[Highly rated reviewer]
Tarkovksy's début, but it's all there
Although apparently quite different from other works by Russian master Andrei Tarkovsky - it has a coherent plot, for one thing - just about everything that was to come is present here. The blasted landscapes and dripping no-man's lands of 'Stalker'; the idea of family (Ivan has lost his, but equally found another one among the officers of the Soviet army, each trying to outdo the others in protecting him) that powered 'Solaris'; the concept of giving up one's safety for the greater cause (Ivan would rather stay at the front than be sent to military school) that was central to 'The sacrifice'. I feel there is a great tension, in fact, between the director's manner, which is very studied, full of beautiful, carefully crafted, formal compositions, and the more conventional, genre-driven demands of the narrative, a tension which the film never quite resolves. The dream sequences, in which Ivan remembers life with his family, are particularly indicative of this: clearly idealised and fantasticated, they play in obvious opposition to the grimness of the war, a lost territory which Ivan, as we see at the end, will never recover. The gleaming, limpid cinematography remains in the mind, caught, like everything else, between two things, here the beauty and the brutality. It's almost a great film, pregnant with talent but Tarkovsky needed complete freedom to achieve the fullness of his art.
(The interviews with cast members on the DVD are particularly valuable for those who, like me, adore Tarkovsky's work). -
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Visionary Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky's first film, MY NAME IS IVAN, is a powerhouse of visual and emotional impact and a portend of many themes Tarkovsky would develop throughout his ... -