The damage caused to people by the Second World War in the 1940s is incurable. It is not only a mutual plunder between warring countries, but also a global and human contest against death. The survival crisis during the war and the reflection on humanity after the war became prominent themes in the literary and art circles in the 1950s and 1960s. Italian neorealism used documentary lenses to show the post-war people’s dissatisfaction. The French New Wave focused on individuals with cynicalism. To escape the pain of war, New German films use a large number of absurd, stream-of-conscious works to express inner anxiety and indifference between people. In the Soviet Union, the genre of "Poetry Movies" emerged. Following the success of Karatozov's "Goose Flying to the South", Tarkovsky established the technique of "Poetry Movies" and formed his own style. His films "Road Roller and Violin", "Ivan's Childhood", "Mirror", "Homesickness", "Stalker", "Rubrov" and other films discuss grand themes such as human survival, Death, art, technology, and philosophy have mythological elements, religious thoughts, and philosophical rationality. The metaphors of a work are extremely complex. Through these themes, we can see the director's deep concern and love for the world. "Ivan's Childhood" is the first work after his student's work. Compared with the later works, Tarkovsky uses poetic film language to analyze the cruelty of the war layer by layer, and show it on the screen in detail. In contrast to the socialist realism films popular in the Soviet Union before, they set aside the limitations of traditional Soviet montages and presented the audience with a poetic cruel war from a psychological level.
1. The "Poeticization" of Film Language
"Poeticization" refers to the use of film language as a rhetoric to describe things. The biggest feature of poetry is its ambiguity and ambiguity. Saussure believes that words are constructed in a social environment and have a kind of fluidity. When we say a word, the recipient can have multiple meanings. Interpretation, if the lens of a movie is regarded as a vocabulary sentence, then the audience will also have different understandings based on their own experience, language environment, country, etc. The moving part of the poetic film lies in this rich ambiguity and language The vastness of the space shaped.
The biggest feature of Tarkovsky’s film language is the use of long shots. He uses imperceptible lens movements to not break the audience’s illusion. He rejected the Soviet montage’s attempt to tell the audience rationality through "conflict" and "contrast." The content, but the presentation of visual content, makes the audience consciously divergent thinking. In this respect, it is consistent with Bazin’s theory of depth-of-field lenses. The slow long lens ensures the unity of space and time, creating a natural and immersive viewing experience. Of course, he did not deny the montage theory, but guided the audience on the basis of not breaking the illusion of the audience as much as possible, reaching the realm respected by Mitri. The use of long shots is of great significance to the "poetic" of the film, because the richer the content covered in a shot, the more meaningful and emotional the information received by the audience.
Secondly, Tarkovsky interspersed a lot of experimental shots, such as a horse in a dream with a long tongue eating an apple by the beach. The director chose to shoot at a very low angle, which is a meaningless plot for the theme of the movie. , But it creates a dreamy and absurd atmosphere, which instead gives the audience a real experience, because our own childhood memories often have some strange and unfounded images that happened at an unknown time; my mother’s subjective shots of Ivan’s smile make The audience agreed with Ivan’s psychological feelings and felt the warmth before the war; the director has repeatedly chosen to shoot water, the blue sky in the bucket, or the shot of playing with the water in slow motion, or the negative film to deal with the raining scene. Make memories full of damp, fuzzy and chaotic feelings. In the plot where the medics and soldiers love each other, the director chose to shoot from the gully upwards, showing a triangular lens. Below are the trees that were broken after being bombarded by artillery, giving a strong visual impact.
The director selectively uses sound, such as the scene of Ivan playing with a girl on the beach. There is almost no dialogue, just laughter. The more concise dialogue processing allows us to focus on the happy emotions of the two children. In the last scene of Ivan crossing the river, the director specifically highlighted the ambient sound of the water, inserting the sound of enemy shells from time to time, creating a tense and depressing atmosphere. In the dream, Ivan was sitting in the car and it was pouring rain. The director only kept the sound of rain and abandoned other sounds. In "Ivan's Childhood", sound is not only a role in shaping the atmosphere, but a choice of the director, and a tool to promote the development of the plot and express the theme.
2. Poetic Metaphorical Interpretation
The value of poetry lies in its ambiguity, and the moving part of poetic movies lies in its ambiguity. Women are given the meaning of tenderness and caring in this film. As a film about war, Ivan's mother, childhood playmate, and female medical staff are the few three female images in the film. The mother represents maternal love. She gave Ivan the initial protection, gave him water to wash his face and take care of her; the girl brought Ivan sincere friendship, the most laughter in the dream came from the clips of him running along the beach with the girl; female A medical worker is a symbol of love and healing. Her identity as a medical worker is healing. Secondly, the clip of falling in love with a soldier is also the only clip in the real world that shows the emotions between people outside of war. The male represents the destruction under the mechanism of war, and Ivan found a home under the barracks of Soviet soldiers, and at the same time is a manifestation of the powerful strength of older men. Ivan represents the beautiful things destroyed by the war. He took the initiative to accept the task, showing the internalization of this child by the war. His position is for all the helpless people in the war. Ivan accepted the task and passed through a birch forest in the second half of the film. If he fails, he will face death. The birch forest here is more like the manifestation of death. Of course, the result is unknown, but Ivan resolutely chose this one. road.
2. The cruel reality behind the poeticization
The director uses flashbacks to show us the secret emotions of a boy in war. Dreams, subconscious minds and the darkness of real war alternately appear. This narrative montage processing method creates a strong contrast between illusion and reality. "Ugly" brings out "beauty". In reality, Ivan is an overly adult child. He has a strong mentality to demand adults with a commanding tone. He can’t play and is silent. Although he is only about ten years old, he demands himself as an adult soldier. , Familiar with the rules and procedures in war. Such a child seems extremely uncomfortable to us in the modern peaceful age, because he has become a tool under the survival pressure of war. It is the "alienation" of war to people. "Alienation" means that Ivan is no longer The natural state of a child, he is the result of a pervert following the environment of war. As for the natural child's ability, we can feel it in his dreams. Under the protection of his mother, he plays happily and laughs wantonly. Freud believes that dreams are the manifestation of human subconsciousness, the state of human beings in the "self", which can transcend the real and social level. From Ivan’s dreams, we can see from a secret perspective that he has a true sense of life. Anticipating.
The film is constantly interspersed with the contradictory scenes of reality and dreams. Ivan is drawn back into the dark war time and time again. We don't know how many young people like him are. The film ended with the death of Ivan. We can only see the record of his death with a photo certificate. Even the photo was almost buried in the dust of gunfire. He finally became a record room that disappeared in history. inside. At the end of the director, Ivan has risen from the individual to the whole of the war. He did not start with the grand scene of the entire war, but from the boy’s failure, accepting the task, and performing the task. Anti-war humanitarianism. This kind of treatment enables the audience to view the war from the perspective of the common people and integrate it into the real event, instead of looking at the war from the perspective of the "other".
Fourth, the end
"Ivan's Childhood" is Tarkovsky's early work. Although his seven works follow the consistent style of "sculpting time", "Ivan's Childhood" is more narrative and has a clearer narrative structure and signifies Corresponding to what is pointed out is also simpler. In the later period, "Nostalgia", "Mirror", and "Flying to Space" directly broke away from the narrative structure and carried out philosophical thinking in the form of stream of consciousness and psychological narrative. They are more mature "poetic movies", but we can still learn from "Ivan's Childhood" sees Tarkovsky's consistent film expression. The style of "sculpting time" is symbolic. He symbolized the material and plot in the lens, which influenced many film directors of modernism. For example, Bergman highly admired his films, and Bergman's "Wild Strawberry" is also interspersed. Dreamland explores death, survival, and religion. Angelopoulos' "Eternity and a Day" and "Landscape in the Fog" use a large number of long shots and depth-of-field shots to express the relationship between people. This kind of realistic film with a sense of the times is expressed in a dreamy and symbolic way, giving people a strange visual experience.
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