The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Andrei Tarkovsky · a film · 1962 · about ninety-five minutes · his first feature · screenplay credited to Vladimir Bogomolov and Mikhail Papava, from Bogomolov’s story Ivan · in Russian, with a few lines of German, as Ivanovo detstvo
Mode
War film turned inward to a child’s mind; lament, dream film and chronicle of the front in one
Mythos
Paradise and its loss: an Eden of water, light, apples and the mother, and a flooded underworld crossed by night to a bank where the dead are hung; the child avenger; the well as depth and as murder; the tree of death in the garden
Phase
A few days and nights on a river at the front, from Ivan’s crossing of the swamp to his going into the dark, broken by four dreams; then a coda in Berlin in 1945
Presentation
Feature film in black and white, in the Academy ratio, with mono sound, about ninety-five minutes, in Russian with a few lines of German; Vadim Yusov’s camera, Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov’s score; newsreel in the coda
Register
From a boy in sunlight to drowned trees under flares; long-held images, water and black verticals; each dream cut off by a sound of war; the comedy of rank in a dugout
Scale
One boy, his officers and a young woman at a river front; a murdered mother in dream; the fall of Berlin in newsreel
Governing Proposition
A boy whose mother and sister have been killed in the war serves the army at the front as a scout, refuses to be sent behind the lines to school, and crosses the river by night into the dark for the last time; his childhood survives only in dreams of light, water, apples and his mother, which the war cuts off each time with a noise or a death. The wager of the film is that a war film can be built on a child’s inner life, that the dreams weigh as much as the action, and that a child the war has made into its instrument has already been killed in everything but his body.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins in light. A boy stands in sunlight among trees; there is a goat, a butterfly, and then his mother’s face. Then the light is cut off, and the boy is at the war, by a windmill. Nothing yet says that what came first was a dream; the film says it by what follows, and the cut from the one to the other is the shape of everything it will do. On one side light, water and the mother; on the other the war, which arrives each time with a noise or a death and ends the dream before it can end itself.
Ivanovo detstvo was made at Mosfilm and released in 1962, the first feature of Andrei Tarkovsky, then thirty. He had been given a production already begun under another director and halted, on a reduced budget. The screenplay is credited to Vladimir Bogomolov and Mikhail Papava, from Bogomolov’s story “Ivan” (1957). Vadim Yusov photographed it in black and white, in the Academy ratio; Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov wrote the score. Nikolai Burlyayev plays Ivan, Valentin Zubkov Captain Kholin, Evgeny Zharikov Lieutenant Galtsev, Stepan Krylov Corporal Katasonov, Valentina Malyavina Masha, Nikolai Grinko Lieutenant Colonel Gryaznov, and Irma Raush the mother. It runs about ninety-five minutes, in Russian, with a few lines of German.
At night, under flares, a boy crosses a flooded swamp alone among drowned trees and comes to Galtsev’s post on the river. He is a child, and he gives the lieutenant orders. The story is Bogomolov’s, and Bogomolov told it as sober reportage of a brave scout. The film keeps the facts and changes what they mean. Ivan’s mother and sister have been killed, and what remains of the boy is what the war has made of him, a scout whose hatred is the only thing left in him. The officers above Galtsev know him, and they care for him.
Movement II
Kholin and Gryaznov mean to send Ivan behind the lines, to the Suvorov military school. He refuses, and they cannot make him go. The refusal is the hinge of the film. The school is the childhood the army can still offer him, and he wants none of it, because his hatred is now the only thing he is. Burlyayev plays him fierce and brittle, with a child’s sudden collapses, and at his most furious pitched higher than the scene can hold.
The officers love him, and they use him. They use him because the war has emptied him of everything but the will to fight it, and that makes him the scout he is. The film does not accuse them. It shows adults who would give the boy back his childhood if he would take it, and who in the meantime send him across the river, because the use is real and they love it as they love him. The war does not only kill children; it converts them, and makes them its most willing instruments.
Then the film dreams again. A well, seen from below: at its bottom, in the water, a star, and the mother leaning over its lip. A shot, the water flung up, and her body. The oldest of images, depth with a light in it and a mother bending over a child, becomes the place of her murder, and the dream that was a refuge ends in the death it was holding back. Each of the dreams falls where the waking story has just taken something from him, and each is ended by the war.
Movement III
In the dugout there is waiting. On the table lies an album of Dürer’s woodcuts, the Apocalypse and its horsemen, and Ivan turns its pages: they name the world he lives in. In the dark of a ruined church, with a knife and its bell, he plays at war, at judgment on the enemy who killed his family. A child’s game, played with a child’s seriousness, has become revenge. Elsewhere at the front there is an old man in a burnt village, a single stroke of what the war has left standing.
Away from the boy, in a birch wood, Kholin finds Masha, with Galtsev near. Yusov’s camera stands low among white trunks; the trees rise in verticals and the figures are cut by them. Kholin holds her over a trench. It is a romance in a key the film does not otherwise use, beautiful and a little self-admiring, and the lives it shows are deformed by the same war, though its plot could be taken away. Masha is the one figure from the light who has strayed into the dark.
The third dream is the most luminous. A lorry runs through rain loaded with apples; the apples spill onto the sand, and horses come down to the shore and eat them. Water, light, apples, animals: it is the Eden of the film, and the world it shows is the one the boy was born into and the war has taken. Against it stands the waking country, swamp, black water and burnt trees, a flooded underworld that only a river separates from the bank where the dead are hung.
Movement IV
Katasonov dies, and the officers keep it from Ivan. The death is the last thing the waking story takes before the crossing, and the boy is not allowed to know it. Around him the dugout talk goes on, the officers’ orders and the comedy of rank, staged and level; the film lets these stretches stand flat, and the score at times insists on what the image has already given. Then the night comes for the crossing.
The officers take Ivan over the river by boat in the dark. On the far bank hang two scouts, and the boat passes beneath them. The boy steps ashore and goes into the dark alone, and the film does not follow him. The waking story ends there, with a boy disappearing into the country of the enemy, and the hero of the film dies off screen.
It is the decisive refusal of the form. A film of the brave scout would end in his mission; this one ends in the dark, and leaves the officers to row back. What the film knows is that the child was already gone before he crossed, and that what crossed the river was what the war had made of him. The death will come to the viewer the way it comes to Galtsev: later, from the enemy’s own papers.
Movement V
The coda is Berlin in 1945. Newsreel of the city’s fall, and among it the burnt bodies of the Goebbels children. Then Galtsev in the captured archive, going through the files, finds Ivan’s, and his photograph in it, and learns that he was executed. Victory does not redeem the destruction of children, and the destruction is not one side’s: the film sets the enemy’s dead children beside the file of its own. Galtsev asks, in sense if not in words that can be held to the letter, whether this can be the last war.
Then the film dreams once more, and does not wake. A beach in overexposed light, a girl, and Ivan running along the shallows toward a dead black tree. The image cuts to black. The waking story ended in an archive, in a photograph and a file; the last image is a dream, and the film decides that the only childhood left to Ivan is the one it has kept. The black tree stands in the garden.
The film shared the Golden Lion at Venice in 1962, and in 1963 Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in its defence against Italian critics who called it formalist. Bergman’s account of meeting Tarkovsky’s work through it is well known, and Tarkovsky wrote of its dream logic in Sculpting in Time. The Soviet poetic cinema of the 1960s followed it, and Elem Klimov’s Come and See (1985) took up its child’s war. It has been shown since 1962 and restored and taught, though it is more often met as the beginning of Tarkovsky than for itself. What has lasted is its alternation: a boy in sunlight and a boy in a swamp, a star at the bottom of a well and a shot, and a last run along the shallows, which ends not in a noise of war but in black.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure; the spine is required. The swamp crossing introduces Ivan as what the war has made him, a scout who gives orders to a lieutenant. The attempt to send him to the Suvorov school is the hinge, since his refusal is a refusal of childhood itself. The dugout, with the Dürer album and the game of war with a knife and a bell, shows play turned to revenge; Katasonov’s death, kept from him, prepares the crossing past the hanged scouts. Each dream falls where the waking story has just taken something away. What gives is the birch wood, a romance that carries the theme but is detachable in plot and long for its share; the old man in the burnt village could be shorter.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and holds. War does not only kill children; it converts them, and a child whose family has been murdered becomes its most willing instrument, loved by the adults who use him and used because they love the use. The officers want to send Ivan to school and cannot, because his hatred is now all that he is; childhood survives in him only as dream. A harder truth comes through image alone: the coda sets the bodies of the Goebbels children beside Ivan’s file, so that victory does not redeem the destruction of children, and the destruction is not one side’s. Held below the top because the officers’ inner lives are thin and much of the force is lament.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Elevation is frequent and of two kinds, luminous and dreadful, set against each other. A boy in sunlight, a goat, a butterfly, his mother’s face, and the cut to a windmill and war. The star at the bottom of a well, the mother leaning over it, a shot, the water flung up. Apples spilling from a lorry in rain onto sand where horses eat them. The night swamp under flares, and a boy alone in it. The camera low among white birch trunks. The boat in the dark past the hanged men. The run along the shallows toward a dead black tree. Held below the top because the dugout stretches are level and the score sometimes underlines what the image has already raised.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The myth is built, and the structure carries it: paradise and its loss. The dreams are an Eden of water, light, apples and the mother; the waking world is a flooded underworld of swamp, black water and burnt trees, and a river crossed by night to a far bank where the dead are hung. The well, the oldest of images, the star in the depth and the mother at its lip, becomes the place of her murder. The black tree at the end of the beach is death standing in the garden. The particular stays particular: a knife, a tin of food, a bucket. Held below the top because the Dürer Apocalypse and the ruined church are partly cited rather than built, and one myth is carried by four dreams.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The inheritance is the Soviet war film, heroic and collective, and the Thaw’s lyrical turn from it: Kalatozov and Urusevsky’s The Cranes Are Flying (1957), Chukhrai’s Ballad of a Soldier (1959); and Bogomolov’s story, sober reportage of a boy scout. The turn: the hero is a child; the war is what it has done to a mind, and the dreams weigh as much as the action; heroism is deformation; the hero dies off screen, and his death is learned from an enemy file. The stake was real: a director of thirty given a halted production on a reduced budget. It stops short of the bar, because Kalatozov and Urusevsky had already set the camera loose in the war film, and the lyrical turn was in the air.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The alternation of dream and war is the knowledge: the title promises a childhood, and the film shows that it exists only in the dreams, which the war cuts off each time with a noise or a death. Told straight, as Bogomolov told it, this is a brave scout’s story; in this form it is a child already killed in everything but his body. The coda completes the form: the waking story ends in an archive, in a photograph and a file, and the last image is a dream, so the only childhood left is the one the film has kept. Held below the top because the birch wood and the dugout talk are conventional scenes the form carries rather than uses.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: sixty-four years of return, and the film yields chiefly in form. The logic of the dreams and the cut from each to the waking world; the inverted and tilted images; Vadim Yusov’s verticals; motifs, water, apples, the tree, the bell, passing between dream and war. It drew argument at once: Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in its defence in 1963 against Italian critics who called it formalist, and Tarkovsky wrote of its dream logic in Sculpting in Time. Ingmar Bergman’s account of meeting Tarkovsky’s work through this film is well known. What holds the axis lower: the meaning, once seen, stands clear and has not divided its readers deeply, and much of the literature reads the film as the prologue to the work that followed.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Released in 1962; the field is the cinema of the 1960s. Intrinsic force: the demonstration that a war film could be built on a child’s inner life, with dream and memory weighed equally with action, and the founding statement of a grammar, long-held images, water and earth as subject, association over plot, that Tarkovsky would carry further. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Golden Lion and Sartre’s polemic made it an international case in its year; the Soviet poetic cinema of the 1960s followed; Elem Klimov’s Come and See (1985) takes up its child’s war. Discounted: the reach of Andrei Rublev, Mirror and Stalker, which is theirs. In a decade of L’Avventura, 8½ and Persona it opened one current rather than reorganising the field.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across sixty-four years. Form: the film as released survives whole, in one version, and its restorations are repair. Presence: continuous since 1962, in Soviet and later Russian exhibition, in festival and repertory retrospectives of the director, on home video in restored editions and in teaching; but narrower than the widest of its span, the least circulated of the director’s major films, more often met as the beginning of Tarkovsky than for itself, with a small public beyond art cinema. Fabric: the surface fixed to its moment is the Great Patriotic War, and the film is about what that war did to a child, so it ages as history, not fashion; the newsreel coda is a document by design. Decades do not outscore centuries.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Command of the medium. Vadim Yusov’s photography bears weight throughout: high-contrast black and white, the night swamp lit by flares, the birch wood in verticals, the well seen from below, the beach in overexposed light. The cutting of the dream transitions, each closed by a sound of war, is exact. Nikolai Burlyayev’s Ivan is fierce and brittle, with a child’s sudden collapses; Zubkov and Grinko give the officers weight. The sound is designed: water, a cuckoo, a bell, the radio. The costs: Ovchinnikov’s score is conventional in places and insists, some dugout scenes are staged and talky, Burlyayev at his most hysterical is pitched too high, and the birch wood is a little self-admiring. Below The Third Man and Chinatown (9.0), which carry no such charges.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the last dream’s beach, a girl, water and sunlight, and the newsreel of Berlin with the burnt bodies of the Goebbels children. One law governs both: children are what war destroys, and the world is divided between a light that belongs to childhood and a dark that belongs to war, each interrupting the other. The well, the hanged scouts, the Dürer horsemen and Ivan’s game in the church obey it. Kholin and Galtsev are older children in the dark; Masha is the one figure from the light who has strayed into it. The range runs from documentary to dream. The strain lies in the birch wood’s romantic key, which the film does not otherwise use, and in the comedy of rank in the dugout.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Judged on what ninety-five minutes hold. A child’s consciousness, waking and dreaming; the family, a murdered mother and sister; the army, its ranks, scouts, orders and care; the state at war, at the front and in the victory at Berlin; history, the Eastern front and the fall of the Reich, held in the coda; the sacred, in a ruined church, a bell and Dürer’s Apocalypse; the natural order, birch, swamp, river, rain, apples and sea, carrying meaning rather than setting; love, in the birch wood. They meet in the boy and are not listed. What holds the axis lowest: the family is absence and dream, labour is absent, the enemy is never seen as people until they are dead children in a newsreel, and the state is the army alone.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.7, then The Sublime, The Living Form and The Made at 8.5. A film that survives whole in its one version and has been shown since 1962, ageing as history and not as fashion; heights of light and dread set against each other from the first dream to the black tree; a form in which the alternation of dream and war is the knowledge that the childhood exists only in dreams; and a photography and a cutting of the dreams that bear weight throughout.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.3: a child’s mind, the army, the state at war, history, the sacred and the natural order meet in one boy, but the family is absence and dream, labour is absent, the enemy appears as people only as dead children in a newsreel, and the state is the army alone. Above it, The Bottomless Well at 7.9, a meaning that stands clear once seen and is often read as a prologue, and Pressure on Tradition at 8.0, a reach that opened one current in its decade and is shared with the director’s later films.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.1 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.5, The Made at 8.5, The Inner Law at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four axes: The Imperishable at 8.7 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.4 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.4 fall a tenth short of it, The Swerve at 8.2 three tenths short and Pressure on Tradition at 8.0 five tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.9, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.3. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The work is held below the summit by the Epochal Gate, on four of its five axes, and by its aggregate, 8.2 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Ivanovo detstvo (Ivan’s Childhood) as released by Mosfilm in 1962, its one version, in black and white, in the Academy ratio and about ninety-five minutes long, from the boy in sunlight to the run along the shallows toward the black tree: directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, his first feature, from a screenplay credited to Vladimir Bogomolov and Mikhail Papava after Bogomolov’s story “Ivan” (1957), photographed by Vadim Yusov, with music by Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov. The production begun under another director and halted before Tarkovsky took it over is history and not the object. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Every axis is judged on the Russian film; the English renderings are the desk’s own, used for sense, and nothing here is charged to a subtitle. No line of the dialogue is held to the word with certainty, so the dialogue is described and not quoted, and Galtsev’s last question is given in sense. Bogomolov’s story is the source, not the work, and is named only where the film departs from it. Facts that could not be verified, among them any uncredited work on the screenplay, the name of the first director, the share of the running time given to the dreams, the exact order of the scenes in the dugout, the place in which Sartre’s defence appeared, the testimony of later directors and the condition of the surviving materials, are not given.