My Name is Ivan (in America) (aka Ivan's Childhood, Ivanovo detstvo) is a Soviet film made in 1962 by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky. 1962 was a common year starting on Monday (link will take you to calendar). ... Andrei Tarkovsky Andrei Arsenyevich Tarkovsky (Андре́й Арсе́ньевич Тарко́вский) (April 4, 1932 - December 28, 1986) was a Russian movie director, writer, and actor. ...

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: The Venice Film Festival (Mostra Internazionale dArte Cinematografica) takes place every year in late August/early September on the Lido di Venezia in the historic Palazzo del Cinema on the Lungomare Marconi, in Venice, Italy. ... The Venice Film Festival (Mostra Internazionale dArte Cinematografica) takes place every year in late August/early September on the Lido di Venezia in the historic Palazzo del Cinema on the Lungomare Marconi, in Venice, Italy. ... Ingmar Bergman Ingmar Bergman â–¶(?) (pronounced in Swedish, but usually in English, IPA in Unicode notation) (born July 14, 1918) is a Swedish stage and film director who is one of the key film auteurs of the second half of the twentieth century. ...

"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. 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 Kieślowski made a similar remark about the film. Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (June 21, 1905 – April 15, 1980) was a French existentialist philosopher, dramatist, novelist and critic. ... Sergei Parajanov or Paradjanov (Armenian: Սարգիս Õ€Õ¸Õ¾Õ½Õ¥ÕºÕ« ÕŠÕ¡Ö€Õ¡Õ»Õ¡Õ¶ÕµÕ¡Õ¶ [Sargis Hovsepi Parajanyan]; Russian: Сергей Иосифович Параджанов; 9 January 1924 — 20 July 1990) was one of the best known directors of Soviet films. ... Krzysztof KieÅ›lowski Krzysztof KieÅ›lowski (June 27, 1941, Warsaw – March 13, 1996, Warsaw) was an influential Polish film director and screenwriter, known internationally for his film cycles Three Colors and The Decalogue. ...

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. Films of the war film genre deal primarily with actual warfare, usually featuring sea, air, or land battles and their combatants, or on daily military or civilian life in the midst of battle or the threat of battle. ... Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchof (Khrushchev) (Russian: Ники́та Серге́евич Хрущёв listen â–¶(?), April 17, 1894 â€“ September 11, 1971) was the leader of the Soviet Union after the death of Joseph Stalin. ... World War II was a truly global conflict with many facets: immense human suffering, fierce indoctrinations, and the use of new, extremely devastating weapons such as the atom bomb. ...

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

Nikolai Burlyayev as Ivan in the first frame of the film

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. Image File history File links Ivans_Childhood. ... Image File history File links Ivans_Childhood. ... Mushroom cloud from the nuclear explosion over Nagasaki rising 18 km into the air. ...

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. Nazi Germany, or the Third Reich, commonly refers to Germany in the years 1933–1945, when it was under the firm control of the totalitarian and fascist ideology of the Nazi Party, with the Führer Adolf Hitler as dictator. ... The Nazi party used a right-facing swastika as their symbol and the red and black colors were said to represent Blut und Boden (blood and soil). ...

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. Final shot of Nostalghia, a famous example of forced perspective Nostalghia (Russian: Ностальгия) is a 1983 film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky and starring Oleg Yankovsky. ...

Still from the last of Ivan's reveries

from japanese publicity poster for ivans childhood produced in the 1960s. ... from japanese publicity poster for ivans childhood produced in the 1960s. ...

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. Grinko, Solonitsyn, and Kaidanovsky in Stalker Stalker (Russian: Сталкер) was a 1979 film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. ... The film The Sacrifice (Offret) by Andrei Tarkovsky, (Sweden, 1986) was filmed when Tarkovsky knew that he was dying of cancer and it can be seen as his testament, as it recaptures motives used in several of his previous films. ...

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. Andrei Rublev is a movie made by Andrei Tarkovsky in the former Soviet Union in 1966. ... Reproductions of Leonardo da Vincis works play an important part in The Mirror. ... The film The Sacrifice (Offret) by Andrei Tarkovsky, (Sweden, 1986) was filmed when Tarkovsky knew that he was dying of cancer and it can be seen as his testament, as it recaptures motives used in several of his previous films. ...

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.

External link

• list of the cast and crew
• Analysis by Fergus Daly and Katherine Waugh