Word and Image
Ivan’s Childhood, 1962 Andrey Tarkovsky
Ivan’s Childhood, 1962 Andrey Tarkovsky
Ivan’s Childhood, 1962 Andrey Tarkovsky
Charon crossing the Styx, Joachim Patinir 1520-1524, oil on panel, Museo del Prado, Madrid
Word and Image The first image is a very vivid picture from the opening shot of Ivan’s Childhood – Tarkovsky’s first film. It starts from a sound of cuckoo, we see a forest and a close up of a young boy looking though a spiderweb on a branch of a young pine tree. Cheerful and light music plays. A tracking shot 1: camera moves up along the trunk, and as it approaches the treetop, we see other trees, grass and a river on the background. The movie is black and white, but this scene is so perfectly staged, that I imagine being there: stepping barefoot in lush green grass, smelling the trees, feeling breeze from the river. There is lightness, happiness and youth. While the image denotation is idyllic picture of childhood, very soon we will know, that for this boy it isn’t reality, but a dream of life that a war stole from him. The second frame is very depressing. It is towards the end of the movie. We already know about the war, we met Ivan - a young boy who lost his home, his mother and sister. He has nowhere to go, and wants nothing else, but to fight the enemy. While Tarkovsky doesn’t use the conventional bloody scenes to show the war, he makes you experience the drama on a deeper level. He makes you think: ‘What, if my grandfather went through this? What, if it were me? Or my son?’. “The next thing that struck me was the fact that this austere war tale was not about violent military clashes,… but the interval between two missions. The author had charged this interval with a disturbing, pent-up intensity reminiscent of the cramped tension of a coiled spring that has been tightened to the limit. This approach to the depiction of war was persuasive because of its hidden cinematic potential. It opened up possibilities for recreating in a new way the true atmosphere of war, with its hyper-tense nervous concentration, invisible on the surface of events but making itself felt like a rumbling beneath the ground.”, - said Tarkovsky. 2 The picture is dark, and there are sad black leafless trees in foggy waters. The sky is lit by falling missiles. The music is very tense and disrupted by the sound of explosions. In the foreground we can barely see a boat that is crossing a river. This is when Ivan is taken on a boat to the enemies positions as a partisan. From conversations we know, there is first snow. It is fall of a year and dawn of Ivan’s life. The last still is from the very end of the film. We know, that Ivan was tortured and killed, so this is neither his life, nor his dream. It is some kind of alternative reality of how his childhood should have looked like. While the image is somewhat similar to the opening shot – it looks light and summery, but something gives away that it’s not a happy scene. Tracking shot of a burned tree top to bottom, we see Ivan. He was just playing hide and seek with his friends, but now he is all alone, looking around, the music is tense. Then he spots a girl. She is running away, and Ivan is following her, they are laughing, the speed and tension grow, 1
StudioBinder on May 3 and 2020, ‘Ultimate Guide to Film Terms: The Definitive Glossary of Film Terminology’, StudioBinder, 2020, p. studio <https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/movie-film-terms/> [accessed 22 March 2021]. 2 Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema, trans. by Kitty Hunter-Blair, Illustrated edition (Austin, Tex: University of Texas Press, 1989). P17
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then there is a series of cutaway shots: burnt tree, the kids, and then the tree expands into a black screen. Donato Totaro says: “I was struck by how a single aspect of nature, the tree, is so deeply engrained in the film’s overall structure and theme of innocence lost (in the case of the lead character, 12 year-old Ivan, and his forced entry into adulthood). As a manifestation of the theme the film is largely structured around a series of dualities that set in opposition the horrible reality of war-time Russia and the idealism of childhood innocence expressed largely through Ivan’s dreams,… Nature, but more specifically the tree, is often at the core of this duality“ 3 The tree in Ivan’s Childhood is a symbol of life. The young pine settling signifies the youth and beginning of Ivan’s life, like it should have been. In the second image the trees are bare, and one of them falls down - Ivan is just about to die. And the last one – the lonely tree on the river. Its core still stands, but it is dead. “Ivan immediately struck me as a character that has been destroyed, shifted off its axis by the war. Something incalculable, indeed, all the attributes of childhood, had gone irretrievably out of his life. And the thing he had acquired, like an evil gift from the war, in place of what had been his own, was concentrated and heightened within him.”,- said Tarkovsky. 4 Another symbol – is the river, that appears throughout the whole story. Ivan crosses its waters and never comes back. The whole movie is a sequence of dreams and reality, a normal child’s life as it was supposed to be and a war-life that he lived instead: heaven and hell, the world of living, an underground kingdom and the river between them. The Styx. The fourth image is Charon crossing the Styx by Joachim Patinir5. It is an oil painting from Renaissance period, which is interestingly combines Greek mythology, where Charon was a boatmen taking the deceased souls along the Styx river to the world of dead, and Christian ideas of Heaven and Hell. Under the sky, the painting is divided into 3 zones: heaven, hell and waters of a river in between. Charon is turning the boat to the right side - presumably the soul has already chosen hell, with the darkness, scary animals and fires. Just like Ivan, when he arrived in a boat with officers to the other side with missile flames – the hell of Nazi’s positions. Ivan’s Childhood is Tarkovsky’s mysterious way to interpret dilemma of hell and heaven in an atheistic soviet society – he shows us a dream of a boy’s life as it should be, and his reality – the hell that he went through.
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‘Ivan’s Childhood: The Tree of Life’ <https://offscreen.com/view/ivans_childhood_the_tree_of_life> [accessed 22 March 2021]. 4 ‘Amazon.Com Link’ <https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sculpting-Time-Reflections-AndreyTarkovsky/dp/0292776241> [accessed 23 March 2021]. P17 5 ‘Charon Crossing the Styx - The Collection - Museo Nacional Del Prado’ <https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/charon-crossing-the-styx/c51349b6-049e-476ca388-5ae6d301e8c1> [accessed 22 March 2021].
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Now Summer is gone And might never have been. In the sunshine it’s warm, But there has to be more. It all came to pass, All fell into my hands Like a five-petalled leaf, But there has to be more. Nothing evil was lost, Nothing good was in vain, All ablaze with clear light But there has to be more. Life gathered me up Safe under it’s wing, My luck always held, But there has to be more. Not a leaf was burned up Not a twig ever snapped Clean as glass is the day But there has to be more. Arseniy Tarkovsky, Now Summer is gone, 1967, translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair 6
Bibliography ‘Amazon.Com Link’ <https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sculpting-Time-Reflections-AndreyTarkovsky/dp/0292776241> [accessed 23 March 2021] ‘Charon Crossing the Styx - The Collection - Museo Nacional Del Prado’ <https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/charon-crossing-thestyx/c51349b6-049e-476c-a388-5ae6d301e8c1> [accessed 22 March 2021]
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Kitty Hunter-Blair, ‘Arseny Tarkovsky. Now Summer Is Gone.... Translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair’ <https://ruverses.com/arseny-tarkovsky/here-summer-is-over/2988/> [accessed 23 March 2021].
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Hunter-Blair, Kitty, ‘Arseny Tarkovsky. Now Summer Is Gone.... Translated by Kitty HunterBlair’ <https://ruverses.com/arseny-tarkovsky/here-summer-is-over/2988/> [accessed 23 March 2021] ‘Ivan’s Childhood: The Tree of Life’ <https://offscreen.com/view/ivans_childhood_the_tree_of_life> [accessed 22 March 2021] May 3, StudioBinder on and 2020, ‘Ultimate Guide to Film Terms: The Definitive Glossary of Film Terminology’, StudioBinder, 2020 <https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/moviefilm-terms/> [accessed 22 March 2021] Tarkovsky, Andrey, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema, trans. by Kitty Hunter-Blair, Illustrated edition (Austin, Tex: University of Texas Press, 1989)
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