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. Taking over a troubled production that another director had abandoned, the young Tarkovsky reshaped it entirely, and the finished film already bears the unmistakable signatures of his later masterpieces.

Nikolai Burlyaev plays Ivan, the 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 intercuts the grim reconnaissance missions through flooded forests and ruined, skeletal landscapes with 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. Working with the cinematographer Vadim Yusov, he achieves images of haunting, sorrowful beauty even amid the devastation.

The film was admired across 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. As an indictment of what war does to the young and as the overture to a singular body of work — Andrei Rublev, Mirror, Stalker — it remains essential viewing: a first feature of startling assurance, lyricism and grief that gave notice of a major artist arriving fully formed.