Ivan's Childhood

Andrei Tarkovsky, Mosfilm, 1962; 96m

Tarkovsky's feature-length debut already has all the hallmarks of his later body of work (so, in fact, did the sole short that preceded it). From iconic visual signatures like apples and horses to the overarching sense of hushed anguish, Tarkovsky stakes his claim at the still-unique territory in world cinema with this tale of a soldier boy whose only recollections of peacetime are sun-blinded dreams about his mother. IVAN'S CHILDHOOD (formerly released Stateside as MY NAME IS IVAN) is a manifestly spiritual, not to say Christian, drama, outraged less by the war of its setting than by the general idea of violence. The Soviet censorship ushered it through as another glory-of-the-Army picture, to learn and compensate later by effectively shelving Andrei Rublev. IVAN'S CHILDHOOD was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival; three years later, one of the film's cast- Andrei Konchalovsky- would return with his own directing nomination.