Ива́ново де́тство / Ivan's Childhood (1962 Andrei Tarkovsky)

This was an interesting time in Russian cinema if you think of the films of Kalatozov (The Letter Never Sent also features a lot of water), the Shakespeare adaptations by Kozintsev and here Tarkovsky's debut. 

What sort of life did he have? What's the significance of water? The river is a key theme in this film, but water's also significant when drops trigger a dream of the boy in a well and his mother being shot.

It's World War Two - well - hang on. The first thing we see is a black and white wood and a track up a tree - in other words, the very end of his last film The Sacrifice. It's a boy's dream. He's flying. He sees his mother, drinks from her pail. She laughs at him, with him. Then the boy wakes up. He's on the run, then gets picked up by the army. He's a tough little customer, 12, and insists on high command being called - and you're thinking 'Really?' But when a senior officer arrives, it's like it's his Dad. Turns out the boy is much respected, has been spying on Germans on the other side of the river. 'How did you get across?' 'I swam.'

The climax of the action is a night trip back across the river, with flares firing into the air sporadically (Roger Deakins has named a shot here one of his favourite in cinema history), with the boy and two fellow officers. The boy heads off alone - we think his mission may have succeeded. But the very end, the war is over, one of those officers finds a record the boy has been detained and hanged. It was only later on that day that I started to wonder if the boy's flashbacks to a situation where children needed avenging was actually a flash forward.

Vadim Yusov's photography is stunning.

Tarkovsky was born in 1932 so would have been the boy's age at the end of the war. His father had left them when he was four, so the absence of a father in this is significant (there's a comment he must have been killed in the war).

You can see the French New Wave has had an impact even here - there's a sequence in a forest, and at the very end, that display this clearly, even has Truffaut-like music. Was Russia more open then? Yes - this is the period known as the 'Krushchev Thaw' after Stalin's death, when censorship was relaxed.

There's plenty of humour here too. The acting's splendid. The boy gives an unforgettable performance - Nicolay Bulyaev (he's in Andrei Rublev too). The soldier with the smile is Valentin Zubkov (also The Cranes Are Flying), Evgeniy Zharikov, Stepan Krylov the older one with the gramophone, Nikolay Grimko (notably also in Stalker), Valentina Malyavina, Irina Tarkovskaya (Tarkovsky's wife playing his mother!)

I've finally watched all the Tarkovskys, finishing with his first. (Well, he made an earlier film, The Steamroller and the Violin, but it's only 46 minutes and doesn't count.) I think I might watch them all again, now, in order. They're all amazing, unlike anyone else's.