Tarkovsky’s film ‘Ivan’s childhood’ is the story of a young boy victimized by war, grown up before his time and living the life thousands of Soviet children were forced to live.
After the officers leave Ivan behind to catch hold of a boat on which they will travel across the river that night, Ivan is alone once again and the sequence which follows is the half dream half imagination of this young boy who has been deprived of his childhood, has lost his family and has been moulded by the violence he has suffered and internalized.
In a top angle shot, Ivan is seen suspending a bell from the ceiling using a thick rope. The frame is first covered entirely with the bell and it is only as the bell goes up that Ivan comes into view crouching in the background, hauling the rope up. The lighting is harsh,much like the rest of the film and creates an area of complete darkness behind Ivan. The rest of the frame is also grey and shadowy. The pendulum of the bell moves slowly in the foreground as the bell hangs ominously from the ceiling and creates a feeling of foreboding. This foreboding is further deepened when Ivan stands up and brings out the dagger he has borrowed for one night and recedes into the darkness. The next shot shows him crawling as his face comes into light from darkness and he violently stabs the knife into the wooden table under which he is crawling, picks up a bottle and hurls it towards the light. He tells himself to keep cool and that is when one realizes that he is play acting, only his play acting is not the innocent act of children, he is a child traumatized by the brutal acts of war, a child who behaves like a grown up, but yet a child who plays war.
For Tarkovsky himself, the importance of this sequence was that despite the fact that Ivan is consumed by an adult passion and lives like a grown up, he is yet a child. The next shot shows him still crouching, his face half lit , torch in one hand and dagger in the other, the camera at his eye level. He crawls behind an iron railing pretending to give instructions like an officer. The silence is broken by the music , he hears a voice and the expression on his face changes to anxiety as he moves forward. Unlike the other dream sequences in the film there is no clear hint of whether this is Ivan’s imagination or is actually happening. There is no marker of this shift into the dream state, and there is a blurring of lines between imagination, dream and memory. This is achieved in the mis-en-scene by creating a dark shadowy space from the beginning that inhabits Ivan as much as Ivan inhabits it so it is not possible to know when reality ends and dream begins. As Ivan’s torch moves over the space, lighting one area while obscuring the other, it reveals an inscription on the wall. “ There are eight of us. All under nineteen. In an hour from now they will shoot us. Avenge us.” It is only later that the reality of atleast this inscription become clear. Voices of people crying start in the background as Ivan comes into frame and moves ahead with the torch as if to really avenge the deaths.
Another blurring of the lines between reality and imagination is achieved in the next shot as one first sees a torch light moving over the wall and supposes it to be Ivan’s torch but then the light reveals Ivan’s face as if someone else is holding the torch and adds to the confusion. This is a long take in which Ivan is standing against the wall and the camera moves from him to the face of a woman then back to him with the dagger and torch in his hand, then reveals the face of a woman standing crouched against a wall looking up and then again to Ivan. It again moves in a random manner, finds the face of another woman, goes back to Ivan and then to the bell. This is a long take which muddles points of views, we see Ivan and we also see what Ivan sees without being sure of its reality. The next shot is a top angle shot where Ivan furiously rings the bell and gradually the voices of his nightmare are drowned by the tolling of the bell. The top angle shot emphasizes the smallness of the young boy, the fact that he is still a frightened child who cannot bear his nightmares. The camera tracks back to reveal the table on which the record player is placed, giving a sense of familiarity of space as his nightmare ends, atleast for a moment.
The next shot is a midshot from his back as he continues to furiously ring the bell. He stops ringing as sounds of voices shouting becomes louder and once again, it is unclear whether these voices are real or imaginary. As Ivan jumps and shouts “Hurrah!”, he returns to playacting again and shouts instructions to an imaginary army. The next shot clearly brings out the victimized child within him as he holds the torch on a coat and shouts at it, shakes the torch and asks the imaginary man if he’s shaking and tells him that he’ll answer for everything. “Do you think I’ve forgotten?”, he says, just before breaking down into tears. He can never sever his links with war and death and his memories return to him while he lives the only life he is capable of living now. As he cries, the door behind him opens and there are sounds of explosions. From the war of his nightmares, Ivan wakes up to the war outside, but for him there is no difference.
In his essay on the criticism of Ivan’s childhood, Sartre praises Tarkovsky for having shown that there is no difference in day and night for this boy. The mis-en-scene of this entire sequence reflects this, with its harsh lighting full of deep shadows, the rough texture of the walls, the transformation of the space into a well of memories and fears. As the door opens, it is daylight outside, but there was nothing in the sequence to suggest this. According to an essay by Fergus Daly and Katherine Waugh, the film was released at a moment when it was no longer ok for innovative young directors to work with the presuppositions and aims of their masters. An entirely new idea of what the essence of cinema involved was coming to the fore and in Tarkovsky’s words, "the cinema must master a completely new material: time." For Takovsky, time was a non chronological and multiple rhythmic phenomenon which when worked into a film created its own pace and rhythms. This way of looking at time was opposed to the way the early Sovietslike Eisenstein looked at montage and editing. Unlike Eisenstein, whose montage was based on a conflict, Tarko saw time and hence montage as something rhythmic and unfolding. Like Bazin, the montage was too fragmented for him. It is not the juxtaposition of shots that create meaning but individual episodes themselves. This is why, not just time, but space also loosens up in this sequence from ‘Ivan’s childhood’ and a familiar space becomes, in the darkness, a space belonging to another time. Sounds also fade in and out and deceive the viewer about their source. Except in the first shot of the bell, there is no creation of depth in the sequence, both the character and the figments of his imagination seem flattened out, ( sometimes literally as against walls) rendering the space into something unrecognizable.
The story is not sentimental or contrived but is based on many real life accounts of children. It is seen as a film that can easily be blended with documentary footage. Despite its play with time and space and reality, the film has a clear historicity and is located in war time
SHAGUN , 2006
