My Name is Ivan
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My Name is Ivan (in America) (aka Ivan's Childhood, Ivanovo detstvo) is a Soviet film made in 1962 by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky.
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History and Cultural Importance
My Name is Ivan was Tarkovsky's first major film (Steamroller and the Violin was his student piece). The director did not restrain his creativity and My Name is Ivan abounds with new, imaginative cinematic techniques and ideas. He inherited the project as the aborted attempt of another director. It was based on a book by Vladimir Bogomolov. Tarkovsky wrote in Sculpting in Time that he did not find the book very good, but stories that were not well written were easier to adapt into films. The film, on its release, received numerous awards and international acclaim, winning the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival and attracting the attention of many people, including Ingmar Bergman who said:
- "When I discovered the first films of Tarkovsky, it was a miracle. I suddenly found myself before a door to which I had never had the key…a room which I had always wished to penetrate and wherein he felt perfectly at ease. Someone was able to express what I had always wished to say without knowing how. For me Tarkovsky is the greatest filmmaker."
Jean-Paul Sartre also wrote an article on the film (http://www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~tstronds/nostalghia.com/TheTopics/Sartre.html). Sergei Parajanov said: "I did not know how to do anything and I would not have done anything if there had not been Ivan's Childhood." Krzysztof Kieslowski made a similar remark about the film.
While the West hailed the film as a major achievement (it is ranked among the greatest war films), Nikita Khrushchev famously banned the film in Russia on the basis that it portrayed a boy fighting on the front for the Soviet Union during World War II, which was not considered good for propaganda purposes. However, little boys often did fight on the front lines during the War like the young hero, Ivan.
Ivan is played by Nikolai Burlyayev, whom Tarkovsky met while still at VGIK film school, and one can hardly imagine a better actor for the role. But in Tarkovsky's book Sculpting in Time, Burlyayev falls victim to heavy criticism and is deemed a poor actor in general. Furthermore, Tarkovsky does not appear very pleased with his first film and he talks at length about subtle changes to certain scenes that he regrets not implementing.
Content
Summary
The film is centered around a 12 year old Russian boy, Ivan, whose parents died at the hands of Germans invading Russia during the Second World War. In striving single-mindedly to avenge their deaths, he lives the life of a homeless orphan. Sometimes he joins partisans and at other times he is with the Russian Army, but he is always adamant to fight on the front line, and he takes advantage of his small size to get reconnaissance jobs for which grownups would be unsuitable.
Thus, Ivan is both a child deprived of a childhood and an adult with no experience or identity. Therefore he gropes for manhood with no role model, nor any beliefs or standards of his own beyond his already fragmentary memories of a happy boyhood before the War, which we glimpse in very brief but powerful reveries (for which Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov wrote a haunting and dreamy musical score). In this way, through Ivan, Tarkovsky explores adolescence. Yet Ivan's fall from innocence is particularly extreme since his raison d'etre compels him to chase an entity that he is too afraid to define and that would transpire to be a phantom were it anything less than the Third Reich itself. Ivan, passionate yet helpless in an unyielding and dangerous world, exposes himself too often and is doomed to die very young in the captivity of the Nazis by execution.
The lives of soldiers Ivan meets and his surroundings are explored with a scrutiny equal to that of the sensitive Ivan to the extent that the story line diverges from the main completely to consider the romantic life of an officer and his hopeless advances towards an army nurse. Much of the film is set in an army dugout where the officers await orders, fearing death, planning assaults and talking apparent trivia while Ivan impatiently and nervously awaits his next reconnaissance mission.
The final scenes in the film are characteristically intense (see Nostalghia for example). They are, in part, set in Berlin after the war has ended and Berlin is under Soviet occupation. As we follow one of Ivan's former officer friends through the Nazi prison where Ivan was executed we become more aware of the horrors of the place and of the fate of our hero, Ivan. When we reach the execution room, the scene is cut to a flashback of Ivan's childhood. That we are witnessing one of Ivan's reveries after his death may point to Tarkovsky's spirituality and his belief in the supernatural. Nonetheless, one feels here that where before there was division between Ivan's childhood and adolescence, now there is complete separation. This is consistent with Tarkovsky’s belief in the necessity of faith to stability: Ivan lost his faith because he became directionless (he says "I fear nothing anymore", but the fear of God is integral to faith). Yet because he is divided between the past of happy childhood and the present of the confusion and chaos of war, the child, in some sense, lives again in the adult's death.
Symbolism and Impressions
Many of the objects that will return in Tarkovsky's later films make their appearance in My Name is Ivan: the dead tree at the end of the film, the young sapling at the very beginning, on which hangs a cobweb through which we see Ivan's face in the very first frame (which gives the impression that his face is shattered) (see picture above), the recurrent use of water and fire, and a panoply of Christian symbolism. For the interpretation of these allegorical and symbolic objects, we must turn to all Tarkovsky's other films, where he uses them in different contexts but with a meaning and importance that remains constant. For example in Stalker, the stalker draws an analogy between hardness and resistance and a dying tree and contrasts it to the pliability of a sapling and declares that that which is hard shall not survive; and in other places, Tarkovsky weaves ideas together, as in The Sacrifice in which a father and son plant a dead tree in the ground in the hope it will spring to life again.
If there is a single theme that pervades all Tarkovsky's films, it is the study of integrity in the presence of division. In particular, war is central to many of his films, including Andrei Rublev, Mirror, and The Sacrifice but nowhere is it more central than in My Name is Ivan.
Although not regarded as intense or as abstract as any of Tarkovsky's other films, much of his first, while there are fast-paced, visually rich moments to frame the spryness of Ivan's youth, is grating and slow-paced. And yet in every moment, one feels the pressure of inescapable transience bearing down upon a spirit that yearns to be contained in an unchanging paradigm. Tarkovsky returns to this theme in Nostalghia with greater maturity and obsessive zeal.
External Link
- list of the cast and crew (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056111/fullcredits)
- Analysis by Fergus Daly and Katherine Waugh (http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/15/cteq/ivans_childhood.html)