Ivan’s Childhood [Ivanovo Detstvo] ***** (1962, Nikolai Burlyayev, Valentin Zubkov, Evgeniy Zharikov) – Classic Movie Review 3567

Co-writer/director Andrei Tarkovsky’s scintillating and stunning 1962 first feature Ivan’s Childhood [Ivanovo Detstvo] is about the feisty and vengeful 12-year-old Russian boy Ivan Bondarev, played by Kolya Burlyayev [Nikolai Burlyayev], who works as a spy on the Eastern front for the partisans after the Nazis kill his whole family. But he ends up among soldiers who want to return him to the safety of military school, though he wants to carry on being useful in the war against the Germans.

Ivan wakes up from a dream, crosses a war-torn landscape to a swamp, then swims across a river on the Eastern front during World War Two, as the Soviet army battles the invading Wehrmacht. He is seized by Russian soldiers on the other side of the river and interrogated by the young Lieutenant Galtsev (Yevgeni Zharikov). Ivan tells him to call and report his presence to Number 51 at Headquarters. Three kindly Soviet officers try to take care of the small Ivan, who is determined to carry on crossing the German lines unnoticed to collect information.

Winner of the Venice Golden Lion Best Film award in 1962 (tied with Family Portrait), Ivan’s Childhood is a beautifully filmed art work, exciting and surprisingly lyrical and poetic with a dreamlike atmosphere, especially given the subject and the director’s later work. Tarkovsky is amazingly confident in his directorial début, Vadim Yusov’s black and white camerawork is striking, sometimes astonishing, and the performances are electrifying, particularly Burlyayev’s.

Based on the 1957 story Ivan by Vladimir Bogomolov, co-written by Mikhail Papava and an uncredited Tarkovsky, it uses surrealism to tell a heartrending tale throbbing with life, truth and emotion – and, yes, poetry. Moving back and forth between the dark realities of World War Two and happy moments of family life before the war, the film has a non-linear plot with frequent flashbacks and dream sequences in its poetic journey through the shadowy fragments of a boy’s war-ravaged youth.

As well as child actor Nikolai [Kolya] Burlyayev, the film features Valentin Zubkov, Yevgeni Zharikov, Stepan Krylov, Nikolai Grinko, Irma Tarkovskaya, Valentin Zubkov, Yuri Zharikov, Valentina Malyavina, Dmitri Milyutenko, Andrei Konchalovsky, Ivan Savkin, Vladimir Marenkov and Tarkovsky’s wife Irma Raush, who also appeared in the director’s 1966 Andrei Rublev.

Ivan’s Childhood [Ivanovo Detstvo] is directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, runs 97 minutes, is made by Mosfilm, is released by Shore, is written by Vladimir Bogomolov, Mikhail Papava, Andrei Tarkovsky and Andrei Konchalovsky, based on the story Ivan by Vladimir Bogomolov, is shot in black and white by Vadim Yusov, is scored by Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov and is designed by Yevgeni Chernyayev.

Future director Andrei Konchalovsky, a friend and fellow student of Tarkovsky at the State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK), plays a soldier and is one of the four writers. Burlyayev played a role in Konchalovsky’s student film The Boy and the Pigeon and thus Burlyayev was cast as Ivan after several screen tests. He played Boriska in Tarkovsky’s second feature, Andrei Rublev.

It is poignant now to realise that the opening shot of a tree is echoed in the final image of Tarkovsky’s last film, The Sacrifice, in 1986.

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