Ivan's Childhood

Twelve-year-old Ivan has lost his family in the war and works for the Red Army as a scout slipping behind German lines. The film is not about the war but about a mind whose childhood has been destroyed, and much of it takes place in dreams. The production had been someone else's. Eduard Abalov's footage drew heavy criticism and was cancelled in December 1960 as unusable. The project went to the young Tarkovsky in June 1961, and he rebuilt it from scratch on limited resources. It is his first feature. It won the Golden Lion at Venice in 1962 and the Golden Gate Award in San Francisco. Its most notable defender was Jean-Paul Sartre, who published a response to Italian critic Alberto Moravia's harsh assessment and called it one of the most beautiful films he had seen. Vadim Yusov shot it, and his treatment of nature as both witness and victim of the war is the film's signature. It sold 16.7 million tickets in the Soviet Union. Ingmar Bergman described discovering it as entering a room whose keys had never been given to him. Tarkovsky himself later distanced himself from it. Who it is for: viewers drawn to the poetic wing of war cinema and looking for a way into Tarkovsky. Who it is not for: anyone wanting incident and pace. Even at 95 minutes it moves slowly, and the dream sections keep interrupting the story.