Why we picked it – When we increased the number of films in a season, one of the reasons was to make room for an occasional classic.
Synopsis – Ivan Bondarev, a 12-year-old Russian boy, wakes from a dream and crosses a war torn landscape when he is seized by Russian soldiers. He has been working behind the lines with partisans after his family were killed by invading German soldiers and has come to make a report. The Russian soldiers become fond of him and want to send him to a military school, but he is burning for revenge and is determined to return to the partisans.
The film – This was Tarkovsky’s first feature film and one of his most commercially successful. It is based on a 1957 short story “Ivan” which was translated into more than twenty languages. There was a previous script and film made that were discarded. Tarkovsky was much the same age as Ivan during the war and brings his own perspective to the film. By the early 1960s, the Soviet state’s attitude to film-making had relaxed from the socialist realism of Stalin’s time. Nevertheless Tarkovsky still had to negotiate with the censors. Coming from the Russian intelligentsia, he believed that film is a high art form and this is primarily an artistic film rather than a story. There are few establishing shots, with many cuts direct to close-up. There are unexplained factures in the narrative: it seems set that Ivan will be sent to military school, but then he re-crosses enemy lines; there is an undeveloped romantic interlude. The film is highly stylistic with idyllic dream sequences, full of light, children and the natural world, alternating with dark, high contrast, expressive sequences in the war torn landscape.
Here is an interview with Kolya Burlyaev who played Ivan, many years after making the film, in which he reminisces about the filming and about Tarkovsky himself.
Director – Andrei Tarkovsky Writers – Vladimir Bogomolov, Mikhail Papava, Andrei Tarkovsky Cinematography – Vadim Yusov