053 - Ivan's Childhood, 1962, Soviet Union. Dir. Andrei Tarkovsky.

Wednesday, February 22, 2017

053 - Ivan's Childhood, 1962, Soviet Union. Dir. Andrei Tarkovsky.

Ivan is 12 years old.

At least Lieutenant Galtsev says he looks 12 years old.

Galtsev is interrogating Ivan.  Trying to figure out who he is and what he is doing.

Ivan has just crossed the river, and the swamp, across waters in which most adults would drown.

He has been picked up by the Russian soldiers.  He acts like an adult.  He demands they call Number 51 at Headquarters so that he can make his report.

Galtsev threatens Ivan.  Tells him to take off his cold, wet clothes.  Take a bath.  Eat something.  Tell us who you are and what you are doing.  Stop demanding things and do as you are told.

Ivan does not do as he is told.  Ever.  By anyone.  He is a force of will.  He is a force of nature.

Ivan prevails upon Galtsev in making the call.  Galtsev is told to give him a pencil and paper and let him make his report.

His report?

This twelve-year old boy who just swam across an impossible swamp and river from German-occupied territory is a scout?

Ivan makes his report.

He goes all the way up the chain of command to Kholin.  Kholin appreciates what Ivan has done but is sending him to military school.  Ivan protests.  Kholin does not care.  Ivan refuses.  Kholin stands firm.  Ivan rebels.

Who is going to win this battle?

Ivan wins.

This 12-year old boy behaves as though he has never had a fear in his life.  He stands up to grown-ups.  To officers.  To generals.  Nobody tells him what to do.

Yet his resolute defiance does not manifest itself as brattiness but as single-minded, stone-cold, iron-focused heroism.

Is he the boy Joan of Arc of Russia?

This is Ivan's childhood.

What war does to people.

What it takes away.

What it gives.

What it changes forever.

Ivan has another childhood.  A childhood of his own dreams.

In this other childhood Ivan is a boy.  A real boy.  Innocent.  Carefree.  Smiling.

In the childhood of his dreams, Ivan runs on the beach with his sister, rides on an apple wagon, eats fresh apples, interacts with horses and deer, laughs, plays, even flies.

And most of all--

In the childhood of his dreams, Ivan still has his mother.

She is not dead in his dreams.

Not killed by German soldiers.

In his dreams she is with him.  They are together.  They are smiling.

In life he is an orphan.  He is fierce and defiant.  In his dreams he has a family.  He is loving and free.

Allow me to introduce you to Andrei Tarkovsky.

The giant of Russian cinema.

There was Eisenstein.  The master of silent films and historical epics.  A kind of D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille of Russian cinema.

And then there was Tarkovsky.

Let us sit at his feet for a few days.  For three short days which will go by all too quickly.

And learn from him.

The Criterion collection has a two-movie double-disc called The Killers.  It is based on Ernest Hemingway's short story "The Killers."  It contains the 1946 black-and-white film noir version directed by Robert Siodmak.  And it contains the 1964 full-color version directed by Don Siegel (later known for directing Clint Eastwood in movies such as Dirty Harry).  The latter version's all-star cast includes our director friend John Cassavetes from earlier this year and Ronald Reagan in a tough-guy role giving it to Angie Dickinson.

The double-disc contains something else.

It contains the 1956 student film "The Killers," made by Andrei Tarkovsky while a student at Soviet film school.  He was studying Siodmak, studying American film noir, and thereby indirectly studying the economy of Hemingway's prose style.

Now here he is in 1962 directing his first feature film.

His first!

An assignment.  Given to him when the original director did not work out.

This is a work-for-hire by a rookie.  Still in his twenties.  Not quite thirty.

It is a masterpiece.

What can you say?

The oft-voted greatest film of all time, Citizen Kane, was directed by a rookie.  In his twenties.

Ivan's Childhood stands without flinching in that kind of company.

The film is replete with symbolism.  Not that Tarkovsky planned it that way as an intellectual exercise.  He is a poet.  It is more that he saw it intuitively.  Organically.  He knew it.  He was born knowing it.  He felt it.  He did it.  It was inside him.

Are we looking from the top of the well down to the bottom of the well at the reflection back at the top of the well?  Or are we looking in the reflection of the water at the bottom of the well back at the top of the well?  Or are we beneath the water looking back at the top of the well?  Or does it change?

The bucket falls.  Splash.  We are now outside the well.

Ingmar Bergman is considered by many to be the great master of world cinema.  He had a long and prolific career.  He wrote and directed many plays.  He wrote and directed many movies.  He wrote about complex life issues and the mysteries of the human heart.  He was a filmmaker of light and shadow.  He was a filmmaker of the soul.  We will watch many of his movies later this year.

This is what Ingmar Bergman said of Andrei Tarkovsky (as included in Criterion's literature on Andrei Rublev).

"My discovery of Tarkovsky's first film [Ivan's Childhood] was like a miracle.  Suddenly I found myself standing at the door of a room, the keys to which, until then, had never been given to me.  It was a room I had always wanted to enter and where he was moving freely and fully at ease.  I felt encouraged and stimulated: someone was expressing what I had always wanted to say without knowing how.  Tarkovsky is for me the greatest, the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream."

If Bergman has that to say about Tarkovsky, it behooves us to listen.

Nikolay Burlyaev, as Ivan, gives one of the great performances by a child in cinema history.  I know.  I have three children who are professional actors, and we study their predecessors.  Burlyaev would go on to work well into the 1990s.

He is alive today.  He is only 70.  Somebody hire him!

There is also a love story among the adults.

And the war story.

This is the kind of movie you want to watch.  And then think about.  And then watch again.  And discuss.  And read about.  And look at pictures.  And watch again.

The movie stays with you.

Ivan stays with you.

Tarkovsky stays with you.

This is Ivan's childhood.