The ironic Russian title, Ivan's Childhood, is actually the more appropriate one since Ivan has already lost his innocence when the film opens. Here is a young boy who has had his childhood stolen from him by a man-made calamity. In the title role, Nikolai Burlyayev gives a remarkable performance, his expressive features allowing him to appear as a hungry, wide-eyed waif one moment and as a confident, expert assassin in the next. Equally unique is Andrei Tarkovsky's direction, which resembles a stream of consciousness narrative, blending realistic action sequences with the visions, dreams, and memories of the title character. There are also numerous cultural references to art, religion, music, and poetry and the visual compositions of the film are often haunting and unconventional: a light above a table swings back and forth to the sound of shellfire, reflections of leafless trees in a lake resemble crosses, a sudden explosion destroys a wall to reveal an icon of the Madonna and child, tilted over at an oblique angle.
When Tarkovsky began work on My Name is Ivan, he was actually replacing another director - E. Abalov - on the project. While it was a difficult production for him - much of the production money had already been spent when he started - Tarkovsky was attracted to Bogomolov's atypical war story that concentrated on the warped personality of the young military scout and downplayed the heroic military exploits. The original screenplay, co-scripted by Mikhail Papava, gave Ivan a happy ending, allowing him to survive the war, marry, and raise a family. But Bogomolov protested this departure from his novella and Tarkovsky remained faithful to the author's vision that Ivan remain a tragic hero who met the fate of most young Soviet scouts during the war. Unlike the original story, however, Tarkovsky added four dream sequences and other visual touches to illustrate Ivan's psychological state in the film which did not please the novella's author. Some of his creative decisions were challenged by the studio which reviewed his work in a strict, bureaucratic matter, subjecting him to thirteen 'editorial' sessions, presided over by respected Russian artists from the literary and film community. At these, major and minor changes were requested such as the removal of the love scene or the graphic documentary footage featuring charred Nazi corpses (excised from the U.S. release) but Mikhail Romm, Tarkovsky's mentor, effectively argued against cutting any footage.
When My Name is Ivan was released in 1962, it brought Tarkovsky international fame almost immediately. At numerous film festivals from San Francisco to Acapulco, Tarkovsky was recognized as an emerging poet of the medium and even many Russian critics saw the film as a major leap forward in contemporary Soviet cinema. But he still had to contend with some critical backlash from Soviet authorities who found the film too stylistically complex or overtly pessimistic. In his book, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema, Tarkovsky wrote: "Working on Ivan's Childhood we encountered protests from the film authorities every time we tried to replace narrative causality with poetic articulations...There was no question of revising the basic working principles of film-making. But whenever the dramatic structure showed the slightest sign of something new - of treating the rationale of everyday life relatively freely - it was met with cries of protest and incomprehension. These mostly cited the audience: they had to have a plot that unfolded without a break, they were not capable of watching a screen if the film did not have a strong story-line. The contrasts in the film - cuts from dreams to reality, or, conversely, from the last scene in the crypt to victory day in Berlin - seemed to many to be inadmissible. I was delighted to learn that audiences thought differently."
Director: Andrei Tarkovsky
Screenplay: Vladimir Bogomolov, Mikhail Papava
Art Direction: Ye. Chernyayaev
Cinematography: Vadim Yusov
Film Editing: Lybba Feiginova
Original Music: Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov
Principal Cast: Nikolai Burlyayev(Ivan), Valentin Zubkov (Capt. Kholin), Yevgeni Zharikov (Lt. Galtsev), Valentina Malyavina (Masha), Nikolai Grinko (Col. Gryaznov), Stepan Krylov (Katasonych).
BW-97m.
by Jeff Stafford
