Ivan's Childhood

The irony of the title is that Ivan has been robbed of his childhood (though partly of his own free will). When we meet the 12 year old boy, he is pleasantly dreaming about being able to fly and seeing his mother, when suddenly he is awakened and forced to swim across a murky swamp. He is a military scout for the Russian army in WWII. This was Andrei Tarkovsky's first feature length film, and in some ways, it's one of his most memorable (and certainly the shortest). Tarkovsky shoots the film in a very expressionistic black and white that stands out from the body of his work. It's a haunting film, though in a different way than his other films. It lacks the hypnotic effect that is often associated with him, but the images have a potency that challenges anything else he's done. It's about a boy who has been robbed of his youth during war time. The dream sequences have an unusual beauty to them, and much of the film harkens to Elem Klimov's 1985 masterpiece, Come and See in which WWII is seen from the perspective of a soldiering, young Russian boy. It is a great film.