Ivan’s Childhood

Andrei Tarkovsky's debut feature, Ivan's Childhood (1962), won the Golden Lion at Venice and announced one of the most important film-makers of the century. He took over a troubled production that another director had abandoned and reshaped it entirely, and the finished film already carries the unmistakable signatures of everything he went on to make.

Nikolai Burlyaev plays Ivan, a twelve-year-old scout whose innocence the war has already burned away, working behind enemy lines for officers who long to send him to safety. Tarkovsky cuts between grim reconnaissance missions through flooded forests and skeletal, ruined landscapes and luminous dreams of the boy's lost childhood (sunlight, his mother, a deep well, an apple cart), so that memory and nightmare press constantly against the present. With the cinematographer Vadim Yusov he finds images of haunting, sorrowful beauty even amid the devastation.

The film was admired around the world. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a celebrated essay defending it against its detractors, and Ingmar Bergman would count Tarkovsky among the very greatest of all directors. It is an indictment of what war does to the young, and the overture to a singular body of work that runs through Andrei Rublev, Mirror and Stalker. Few first features have this much assurance, lyricism and grief, and it gave notice that a major artist had arrived, fully formed.