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Mike Wilmington

By Mike Wilmington Wilmington@moviecitynews.com

Wilmington on DVDs: Ivan’s Childhood

PICK OF THE WEEK: CLASSIC
IVAN’S CHILDHOOD  (Blu-ray) (Four Stars)

(U.S.S.R.: Andrei Tarkovsky, 1962  (Criterion Collection)

 

Andrei Tarkovsky’s first feature film, the magnificent Ivan’s Childhood (1962), started one of the cinema’s most uncompromising and brilliant directorial careers. This astonishing picture, a critical hit almost from its first screenings, won the Venice Film Festival’s top prize, the Golden Lion, and established the 30-year-old Tarkovsky as a major  international art film creator. It’s still a dazzler and a shocker, an anti-war film of jolting intensity, piercing emotion and shimmering lyricism. Called My Name is Ivan (at first) in the U.S.,  it’s the nightmarish tale of a 12-year-old boy, Ivan  (played by 14–year-old Nikolai Burlyaev) who lost his entire family to the Nazi invaders, and now acts as a scout for the Russian partisans, working with the sympathetic Captain Kholin (Valentin Zubkov) and the Soviet Army on dangerous missions — forays into enemy territory. This is the account of the pivotal two days in Ivan’s life.

 

Ivan’s Childhood is not only one of the best of the ’50’s-’60s revisionist Russian war movies — a grouop that included The Cranes are Flying, Ballad of a Soldier, and Fate of a Man — and one of   Tarkovsky’s best pictures, it is the precursor of much that followed in his remarkable career.  Ivan is  his most popular and accessible film, and the one that was most universally acclaimed during his lifetime — despite the fact that it is not necessarily typical of this great, stubborn, obsessive, poetic Russian artist. There are scenes of romantic birch forests and eerie battlegrounds lit with flares and explosions, images as beautiful and haunting as any Tarkovsky later made in gems like the 1966 Andrei Roublev or the 1975 The Mirror. But Ivan’s very accessibility, the fact that it connected so immediately with world audiences, is what sets it apart from his offbeat masterpieces to come: films like Roublev, Solaris, The Mirror and The Sacrifice.

The young director of Ivan was strongly influenced by the camera virtuosity and visual coups of director Mikhail Kalatozov and cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky in their 1957 classic The Cranes are Flying and their poetic 1959 epic Letter Never Sent, but Tarkovsky went even further. Working from original author Vladimir Bogomolov’s script of his popular novella, and collaborating on the final writing with his film school buddy Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky (the screenwriter of Andrei Roublev, the writer-director of “Siberiade,” and a cineaste who made it to Hollywood in the ‘80s), Tarkovsky crafted, in the gorgeous, terrifying Ivan’s Childhood, a film of passion, terror and aesthetic bliss.

We remember  young Ivan’s face as we remember the faces of the two tragic friends in Shoeshine, of the street kids in Rome: Open City, of the little boy in Bicycle Thieves — of all art film children caught in the crucibles of war and social injustice. Tarkovsky’s portrait of innocence ravaged by war has never lost its force and grace.

Extras: Video appreciation by Vida T. Johnson; interviews with actor Burlyaev and cinematographer Vadim Yusov: Booklet with essays on Ivan’s Childhood by Diana Iordanova and  Tarkovsky, and a poem, “Ivan’s Willow,” by Andrei’s father, Arseny Tarkovsky.

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One Response to “Wilmington on DVDs: Ivan’s Childhood”

Wilmington

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
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