Ivan's Childhood

Ivan's Childhood (1962)

Иваново детство

In WW2, twelve year old Soviet orphan Ivan Bondarev works for the Soviet army as a scout behind the German lines and strikes a friendship with three sympathetic Soviet officers.

Date of release
1962-05-09
TMDB
7.8 / 10 (875)
Runtime
1h 35m
Genres
Drama, War
Director
Andrei Tarkovsky

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Based on: Ivan
  • Awards: 1 · Nominations: 1. Including: Golden Lion

Ivan's Childhood, sometimes released as My Name Is Ivan in the US, is a 1962 Soviet war drama film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. Co-written by Mikhail Papava, Andrei Konchalovsky and an uncredited Tarkovsky, it is based on Vladimir Bogomolov's 1957 short story "Ivan". The film features child actor Nikolai Burlyayev along with Valentin Zubkov, Evgeny Zharikov, Stepan Krylov, Nikolai Grinko, and Tarkovsky's then wife Irma Raush.

Production

Ivan's Childhood was Tarkovsky's first feature film, shot two years after his diploma film The Steamroller and the Violin. The film is based on the 1957 short story "Ivan" (Russian: Иван) by Vladimir Bogomolov, which was translated into more than twenty languages. It drew the attention of the screenwriter Mikhail Papava, who changed the story line and made Ivan more of a hero.

Mosfilm gave the screenplay to the young film director Eduard Abalov. Shooting was aborted and the film project was terminated in December 1960, since the first version of the film drew heavy criticism from the arts council, and the quality was deemed unsatisfactory and unusable. In June 1961 the film project was given to Tarkovsky, who had applied for it after being told about Ivan's Childhood by cinematographer Vadim Yusov.

Tarkovsky continued his collaboration with cinematographer Vadim Yusov, who was the cameraman in Tarkovsky's diploma film The Steamroller and the Violin. Nikolai Burlyayev had played a role in Andrei Konchalovsky's student film The Boy and the Pigeon. Konchalovsky was a friend and fellow student of Tarkovsky at the State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK), and thus Burlyayev was also cast for the role of Ivan.

Nature takes up an important role in Ivan's Childhood. Before the film’s release, the Stalinist viewpoint on war cinema in the 1930s and 40s was that of instrumentalizing nature as a means to serve human agency in context of violence. Ivan's Childhood is produced during the stagnating period of Khrushchev thaw, and as a result instead is considered pioneer in its use of extensive and predominant representation of nature.

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