Ivan's Childhood is a 1962 film directed by Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky. As a director's feature film debut, "Ivan's Childhood" won the Grand Prix of the Venice International Film Festival , the Golden Lion of San Marco, as soon as it debuted.
The main story of the film is that the teenager Ivan joined the Soviet Red Army and became a small scout after his parents were killed by the German Nazis, and he was bent on avenging his parents with a grudge. The captain of the Red Army thought that war was not a child's business and wanted to arrange for him to go to school in the rear, but Ivan strongly demanded the mission. In the end, Ivan failed to triumph in a covert operation, and it was not until after the victory of the war that he broke into the rear of the enemy army and discovered the file of Ivan's sentence of hanging.
Tarkovsky, along with Fellini (Italy) and Bergmann (Sweden), is known as one of the three most talented artistic directors in the world. Bergman has a high reputation for Tarkovsky: "At first glance Tarkovsky's film seems like a miracle. Suddenly I found myself in the doorway of a room where no one had ever given me the key to the room, and I had always longed to be able to get in, and he could get in, moving freely and with ease. "
Tarkovsky has only seven films in his life, but each one is a classic film in the history of world cinema, and in this article, I will dissect the film from three aspects: Ivan's tragedy, poetic film, and film time and space.
<h1 class = "pgc-h-arrow-right" > Ivan: The Epitome of Wartime Tragedy</h1>
"Ivan's Childhood" is adapted from Bogomolov's novel "Ivan", the narrative style of the original novel is cumbersome and loose, the creative rhythm is not shocking on the surface, but it is like a perspective view of the real war atmosphere, condensing Ivan's short and tragic life.
Born in the context of war, Ivan is like a black hole, and the fatherly love and motherly love and innocent, pure nature that he should have had in childhood are deprived by war. In its place are alienations and distortions that gather and swell in the body thanks to the war.
At the end of the film, when the Soviet Union is victorious in the war and reveling in the national celebration of building socialism, there is an irrevocable gap between Ivan and the country, and there is nothing to redeem Ivan's personal death. Marx once said that history often progresses through its dark side. Pain, sweat and blood are often the things that people least want to count against the social cost.
"Ivan's Childhood" reminds people of the tragic facts of human and historical progress in a gentle, unpunished, but powerful way. There is no pessimistic factor, there is also no cheap optimism, there is only the will to struggle and a clear understanding of the cost. When Ivan's Childhood won the Golden Lion, it sparked controversy in critics, with Sartre stating: "It is a bourgeois tragicomedy that a child is destroyed by his parents; it is a tragedy of the Soviets that millions of children die or live because of war." "
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > poetic film: imagery resonates after lyricism</h1>
In traditional dramatic literature, the characters always develop logically and linearly with the plot. Tarkovsky believes that cinema is like poetry, poetry is not only a genre, poetry is a feeling of the world, a special way of looking at reality.
The genre of poetry films negates the plot, emphasizes the use of metaphors and associations, and achieves a dexterous lyrical purpose. In Ivan's Childhood, Tarkovsky attempts to use poetic dreams to lyrically, using concrete, accurate imagery to complete abstract expressions.
For example, in the third dream, with a thunderclap, the screen completes the montage switching from the positive film to the negative film. Under the artistic effect of the negative, the relationship between black and white is displaced, and the sun shines black light in the white forest covered with ice and snow. In this surreal scene, Ivan chooses an apple for the girl in the carriage, the girl's face appears three times in front of the background of the negative, but the expression is from joy to sorrow, and the audience knows what the sad emotion is for a little thought: the director injects a foreshadowing of the coming reality tragedy in Ivan's dream.
Thus, through coherent poetic narration, the audience no longer has to rely too much on the preset of the plot, but uses the imagery provided by the director to know the meaning of the film and the sound outside the string, and understands the core and spirit of the film at the same level as the director.
Most directors' narrative modes are like the linear logic of geometric theory, and few directors can use poetic narrative methods to build a combination of sensibility and rationality. Tarkovsky, on the other hand, saw the poetry of daily life, broke through the barriers of linear logical thinking, and reproduced the subtlety and depth, complexity and truth of life.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > movie space-time: virtual reality is born</h1>
Tarkovsky: "Cinema gives humans the tools to intercept time. "Ivan's Childhood" as Tarkovsky's feature film debut, in which the film sculpts time in a way that is like a unique gaze, as far as the eye can see, the heart is going.
"Ivan's Childhood" is composed of the war environment of real time and space and the beautiful dreams of non-real time and space, two virtual realities of time and space, such as two parallel time streams, but in fact they are intertwined with each other. The author will analyze the virtual and real space of this film from the aspects of photography technology and visual spectrum.
Photographic techniques
1. Speak with the eye: In the non-realistic time and space, through the overall bright and dreamy atmosphere, the poetic visual effect is created, thus highlighting the dream that should not be an ideal.
In real time and space, the use of strong chiaroscuro and large areas of shadows to achieve low-key dim visual effects, while unstable light sources strengthen instability and tension, highlighting the properties of real time and space non-state.
Example 1, the film begins in a forest in the clear daylight, Ivan walking through the thick forest, flying low among the white butterflies, ivan standing and watching is lifted upwards like a cloud. In terms of scene design, with sunlight as the main light source, the overall picture is bright, and the strong light of the sun passes through the gaps in the branches and leaves to form a beautiful pillar of light, which makes people feel a sense of beautiful enjoyment. At the same time, the choice of small light ratio and backlit shooting allows Ivan's image to be surrounded by light, and the childlike and lively color does not lose its delicate softness, smooth and clear color.
Example 2, followed by the second scene where Ivan wakes up screaming, the camera is shooting in a low camera position, making it difficult to discern other details in the pitch-black room except for the side and top lights that illuminate ivan's facial contours. When Ivan goes downstairs, he reveals a new space, and the camera pans the camera to follow, presenting a complex curve scheduling in three dimensions through the two-way movement of the characters and the camera. The light and shade of Ivan's face changes many times with the scheduling of the scene, the only constant is that the light ratio of the face is always large, and half of the face is always shrouded in darkness.
The hazy light in the harsh war reality is clearly distinguished from the soft tone of the childlike dream of the first scene, which on the one hand stipulates the visual habits of the film, and on the other hand, it makes a clear footnote to show ivan in a huge gap.
2. Long shot: The famous French film theorist André Bazin said in the book "The Ontology of Photographic Images" that the nature of cinema to reproduce the original appearance of things is the basis of film aesthetics. Unlike the frequent editing of montages, long shots try to restore the integrity of space, reveal the dripping of time, and show the multiple meanings of things through a single long shot.
In "Ivan's Childhood", Tarkovsky makes full use of long shots, through the gradual change of space, and subtly sculpts the flow of time veins.
In the first shot of the film, Ivan stands behind a tree and looks left and right at the camera, the foreground is shrouded in cobwebs, at which point the lyrical whistle plays, Ivan draws to the left, and the camera rises vertically along the trunk of the pine tree. Usually, a shot ends here, but in the process of "ascending", Ivan re-enters the painting from the left and appears in the lawn of the distant view.
At this time, the scenery changes from close-up to long-range, the shooting angle changes from head-up to top-down, with the help of the movement of the character and the movement of the lens, the three meanings of the character characteristics, environmental information, and viewpoint changes are very generalized and accommodated in the long shot. Tarkovsky's sculpture of time is condensed on the screen into a concrete visual shape that the audience can "touch". Such a meticulous and intricate shot design runs through the film, and the birch forest, the trenches, the flooded river surface and the beach in the dream, the beautiful and exquisite pictures and fine scheduling make the whole film exude poetry and a long aftertaste.
Visual spectrum
Ivan's Childhood also distinguishes between virtual and real through open or closed spatial environments and scene elements. Ivan's dreams almost all take place in an open natural environment: in the first dream Ivan runs in the hot summer forest, in the second dream Ivan and his mother lean into the well, with their backs to the blue sky, in the third dream Ivan and the girl sit on an apple truck under heavy rain... There's also the coastline where horses gallop and the soft sand beaches where children hide and seek.
In contrast to dreams, the environment in reality is extremely closed. When Ivan woke up, he woke up in a narrow windmill, a shelter that reached the top, a narrow trench, and so on. At the same time, Tarkovsky also used objects such as iron fences, wings, and crosses as foregrounds to divide the space that was not open to pieces.
Signal flares that cross the canopy, flickering candles and fires, spots of light that jump on the surface of the water at dusk, and hidden smoke from the outside, elusive changes in light and shadow are on the one hand carvings of the passage of time, on the other hand, highlighting the abnormal properties of war time and space, suffocating, depressed, gloomy is the environmental style and wartime sigh. This is in stark contrast to the open, open natural landscape and soft and serene atmosphere of the dream.
In reality, the lake is cold and silent, Ivan crosses the water alone from the corpses of the field to the enemy, and the black and white images silently reflect the silent childhood of wartime history. At the end of the film, the coast is undulating, and Ivan and the girl in the dream splash and run to the bright, but everyone knows that this is ultimately just a lie that the director has plated with poetry and dreams.