A war film of rare precision, visually fascinating, already foreshadowing the great career of the enigmatic Soviet director.
Andrei Tarkovski’s first feature film opens with a
plan identical to the one that ends his career: that of a child and a tree,
traversed from bottom to top by an ascending travelling, lyrical image of an
aspiration to the ideal based on innocence before the world that founds the
work of the Russian master and gives him his justification. Between these two
shots, twenty-four years, seven films, an exile, of which we already see that
this Russian filmmaker, the greatest since Eisenstein, has not had an easy
relationship with the regime, which has seen it work on a work whose vision and
ambition are at the opposite of those advocated by the Soviet ideology. Ivan’s
Childhood comes out in 1962, under Khrushchev, who began in 1956 the destalinization
aimed at destroying the cult of the personality dedicated to the Little Father
of the People in the Soviet Union, revealing in particular some of the abuses
committed under Stalin. This period saw the publication of A Day of Ivan
Denissovich of Solzhenitsyn, which for a time was in the good graces of the
party leaders, and a relative freedom was left to the artists in their
criticism of the Stalinist era. We should not overestimate this freedom, left
above all for the purpose of unbuttoning an icon, so that a new nomenklatura is
implanted in place of the previous (a specific feature of the Soviet Union is
to designate by self-criticism a discourse aimed at legitimizing the social
domination in place).
It is from this margin of manoeuvre that Tarkovski enjoys when starting his historical film, an adaptation of a short story by Bogomolov, at the end of an opening period. She also explains that he came late to the cinema, after humanistic studies, a passage through geology and schools of painting and music followed during his training in directing at the VGIK. Son of a poet of national renown, he takes his time to cultivate himself and to confront various forms of practices and handicrafts, before a resounding entry into the world of the 7th Art at a propitious time (The sooner her work was unthinkable, just later she might never have seen the light of day). This is also the time of the Cold War, certainly at a less tense point than the previous decade, dividing its audience into two zones: favorable reception to the West, where it is awarded the Golden Lion in Venice, praised in San Francisco, Khrushchev and his representatives in the East, criticizing the film for its evocation of dissident factions during the Second World War and the use of children at the front. Ivan’s Childhood is relegated to a second zone exit in the territory, a form of economic censorship manifesting a misunderstanding between Tarkovsky and state control that will only worsen later in his career, until to be subjected to systematic blame and ire. The film is however defended by a great figure of the European left (also sign of the distance taken by the intelligentsia of the West towards the East) in the person of Jean-Paul Sartre. (It may seem surprising that the pantheism and the propensity to the sublime of Tarkovsky have touched the thinker of an inert nature, inaccessible in itself, fundamentally hostile, but the list of artists defended by Sartre has in its entirety something at once surprising and seductive).
Ivan’s Childhood thus begins and ends with a childhood dream. The first is located in an idyllic summer forest, where a boy runs among the animals (spider web, goat, butterflies, how can not think of the pastoral of The Night of the hunter?), joins his mother on the singing of a cuckoo; the second on a Baltic beach where he and a bunch of kids play hide-and-seek between a few trunks, with a young girl as a racing partner filmed in love. We are pulled out of the first dream by gunfire, waking the boy who slept in a mill, to plunge him into a steppe populated by corpses and a menacing swamp. This child (Nykolay Burlyaev, known as Kolia), we will learn in a first confrontation with a superior, a young man who also seemed too young for war, is called Ivan. His agility and his small size earned him to operate for the intelligence service, under the tutelage of a lieutenant acting for him as godfather and surrogate father. He has just swam across the Volga, but still has all his energy to stand up to the soldier who ignores his unofficial incorporation into the army. It is the same lieutenant who will find in a besieged Berlin the photo revealing his death at the hands of the Germans, after having voluntarily embarked in the partisan troops. The unsustainable vision, on the voices of his torturers off, of the place of his assassination preceding the last dream vision of the film, fantastical, that of a stolen childhood.
The subject could be soothing, but Tarkovski is careful not to schematize it by making his little soldier a victim. He makes him a little man dreaming of his mother and a friend of the game, a volunteer boy, fierce, reckless, demanding to return to the enemy lines before the desire of his leaders to see him stop this dangerous activity to join a school of executives. For this orphan (another dream shows us his mother falling under bullets, leaving him alone at the bottom of a well) has only war as a playground, using an herbarium as a model of the opponent’s positions, advancing in a night that is lit only by rockets, from water to the neck, conversing with an old man on the brink of madness and starvation. Ivan is a small and brave innocent tale for children immersed in a muddy universe, a night that never ends, that of the Second War of the XXth Century.
The committed child is the most archetypal figure of the heroes of Tarkovsky, all innocent in their measure, all weak in the face of the time. The others, the adults, if they have for each their part in a compromise with the order of things, are certainly cowardly, but not bastards for all that. Neither the soldier who shrinks from the adoption of Ivan, nor the soldier who cannot take on the love of a nurse, nor even his rival Kholin, abusing his authority in a scene of misguided seduction in a birch wood ending in a too common form of harassment, but whose military competence is not in doubt. Each fulfils its role in the context of a war that must be won, but any human relationship beyond this strict framework seems doomed to failure. Here we see the great theme of Tarkovsky on a quest for meaning that does not offer the simple modern technicality (passing through love, here powerless in the face of the war disaster), the confrontation of a just minority with those who accept the existential vacuum left beyond their function… whether it is a child claiming for him the action in order to better hide his traumas, or a woman in love who will be despised by the one she loves who knows only how to morigenate her.
To this facet of the child just facing the tyranny of
adult conformism is added another: that of a misguided kid, constantly on the
defensive, with the behavior of little chief, repressing nightmares and bad
memories, frightened by his voice at night (by the fear therefore that others
hear him moan, reveal who he really is), insensitive to the aesthetic
experience in a way that holds both stupidity and pathology (the episode of
Dürer’s lithographs in which he sees only the German enemy). This ambivalence
of the just, his lack of purity inherent in his position of weakness, Tarkovski
will find an exact incarnation in the Stalker, both noble and pathetic, full of
a transcendent and asocial ideal in front of the company of men. Ivan is double
too. There is an Ivan against the epoch (the one whose freshness of its
relation to the world disturbs the established order) and produces it (this
little soldier who fanatically makes war when he should not), and it is
difficult to say whether his exalted voluntarism is more the fruit of the first
or the second. By not confronting these two facets, which take over one after
the other according to the scenes, the film suffers from a certain imbalance. At
the moment when we would like Tarkovski to tackle the schizophrenic of his
character, he atomizes it purely and simply from his narrative, who will not
follow his involvement in a front-line militia in the last third and who will
make us find him again only at the moment when the lieutenant refusing Macha’s
love discovers his death (death of his own ideal? of the aspirations of love
common to those of childhood?). The film holds on to (and does not solve) a
problematic ambiguity: is the child Ivan the one who in his courage defends
purity in front of adults, or the representative even, in his unconsciousness,
of a wasted purity, of a denied childhood? This contradiction also reveals the
moral turmoil that there is always to confront the Second World War (and a
fortiori from the point of view of the Russian troops), legitimate war for its
purposes and unacceptable in its means, just and monstrous fight. It is at
least Tarkovski’s credit for seeing that a hero is both child and psychotic.
Ivan’s Childhood contains background and forms in its
bosom all the great figures of the Tarkovsky work to come: ample camera
movements, imbrication of memory and facts, poetic relation to the real,
montage favoring the sensation of the flow of time in the sequences,
expressivity of sound design, recourse to cultural quotation (engravings
showing on one page the Teutonic barbarity, on the other the figure of Goethe,
poet whose name nobody manages to find again) to the archive (Berlin in ruins,
the dead children of Goebbels), figure of the mother, of a woman (Macha) more
human than are those who want to define themselves only by their function,
methodical interest in the human face, visual lament in the face of the misery
of the human condition and, always, aspiration of the staging in the same
instant towards another, another state of the world.
This seminal film of his future work, whose
singularity has since generated disciples (Elem Klimov with Requiem pour un
massacre, Scott Hicks, an unequal filmmaker sharing the same preoccupation with
passing time and citing it as his favourite film), yet lacks an organic unity
between these different motifs, an equal breath between its sequences. If he
does not have the full power of future summits, Ivan’s childhood remains a
beginning that many directors of lesser talent or less sure renown would envy.
When I was making my first film, I asked myself this question: Can I make a film or not? And to find out, I jumped up and down, thinking that if I succeeded, I would have earned the right to make movies. That’s why Ivan’s childhood was so important to me: a kind of passing examination for my right to creation. (…) It was after Ivan’s childhood that I had the feeling that cinema was within my reach. (…) A miracle had taken place: the film was successful. Something else was now required of me: to understand what cinema was." Le Temps scellé, Andrei Tarkovski, 2004, Petite Bibliothèque des Cahiers du Cinéma.
What he offered here, the director must now
systematize it. It is this melting of his motifs into a powerful and innovative
system that Tarkovsky will succeed from his next film, Andrei Roublev, and that
he will carry after a logistical challenge (Solaris) to a point of
accomplishment with The Mirror, point incandescent of his cinema whose promise
is contained in this first work. It already reveals its genius, a thematic and
stylistic maturity uncommon for a career start. This is already a lot, and
rather than insisting too much on its limits, perhaps we should first see that
we had to start from everything the film dares and succeeds to reach as far as
this visionary then did.
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