Tarkovsky begins Ivan’s Childhood with the first of four dream sequences, in which the audience is granted access to the mental world of the character. However, the fact that we see Ivan within the dream creates a degree of objectification in this and later sequences. Though the film begins with a shot of Ivan standing beside a tree and looking out through a spider’s web, perspective in this sequence frequently moves from such objective angles to perceptual filtration, a term used by Seymour Chatman to describe instances where images and sounds are relayed to the viewer ‘as if the narrator sat somewhere inside or just this side of the character’s consciousness and strained all events through the character’s sense of them’. Such a shift occurs with the second shot of the film: an uncomfortably close view of a goat immediately followed by a shot of Ivan looking. Moments later a moth flits across the sunlit field succeeded by a shot of the boy not only looking but also tracing the motion of the insect with his eyes. A similar series follows as Ivan rises through the trees and a cut is made to a shot imitating his gaze as he descends a hill. The alternation of objective shots with filtration is a crucial component of Tarkovsky’s narrative technique, one which evolves considerably over the course of the film and which reveals a great deal about the film’s overarching thematic concerns.
The first dream concludes, as does the second, with the apparent death of Ivan’s mother and he awakes in a wholly different environment. The grim world of wartime Ukraine in 1943 presents a stark contrast to the bright, summer world of the dream and this opposition is further underscored in a series of negative relationships, realized by the movement of the boy in relation to the viewer’s perspective as well as the movement of the camera itself. Returning to the opening shot of the film, Ivan quickly moves away from the web and out of the frame to the left just before the camera rises to the top of the tree. As it stops, Ivan reappears, moving back into the frame from the left but now at a considerable distance from his initial position. After he awakes from the dream these positions and movements are reversed. As the boy steps out of the windmill in which he has been hiding the camera is set at a distance from the character. Ivan again exits the frame to the left and quickly reappears in the immediate foreground, having completed, in reverse, the same elliptical motion found in the first shot of the dream. Within moments he is making his way through a dark swamp and there is another reversal of the opening shot. As Ivan approaches through the stagnant water the camera descends along the trunk of a dead tree, a counterpoint to the live birch of the first shot, and comes to rest as he negotiates a line of barbed wire; a negative and unnatural variation of the web framing his face earlier in the film. Thus, from the outset, the film establishes two inverse and, for the moment, divergent narrative planes. Motifs:
Mirrors and Matches –Tarkovsky uses mirror images as a narrative device, not only to draw a distinction between the alternative worlds of the film, but, in my opinion, to also create associations between Ivan and the Gal’tsev. From the opening frames of Ivan’s Childhood, Tarkovsky uses a series of graphic matches to actively encourage the viewer to link the two characters, despite their obvious differences on the surface. These matches, shots consisting of similar compositional patterns and elements spread out over the course of the film, repeatedly reinforce a largely unseen connection between the two and, perhaps most importantly, set the stage for the fusion of the characters in the film’s epilogue. The match I was referencing from the beginning of the film is actually the very first shot, which is negatively matched twice in the sequences that follow: Ivan is framed by the web and, a short time later, barbed wire. Jumping ahead to the epilogue, there is a similar shot of Gal'tsev, now in the ruins of Berlin, framed by a strand of barbed wire as he experiences his own variation of the waking dream discussed in the next section
Pacing – Tarkovsky also uses the pacing between cuts to help distinguish between oneiric realm and reality. Although the first shot of the film is 24 seconds, this is uncharacteristically long for a dream sequence. The next three shots last only 2, 8 and 4 seconds respectively. Generally, shot length on the realistic plane is considerably longer than in the dreams and though they are brief according to Tarkovsky’s later standards, the pace of editing is still far slower than what we find on the oneiric plane.
Music – Tarkovsky's choice of musical accompaniment contributes to the surreal feeling of the scene. Employing a softly texturized harmony of light flutes and plucky strings, the music is reminiscent of the science fiction orchestrations of Gustav Holtz. The lightness of the music contrasts with the stark silence Ivan wakes up to. This motif of soothing, gentle music during dreams and silence except for mortar explosions during reality is repeated throughout the film.
The first dream concludes, as does the second, with the apparent death of Ivan’s mother and he awakes in a wholly different environment. The grim world of wartime Ukraine in 1943 presents a stark contrast to the bright, summer world of the dream and this opposition is further underscored in a series of negative relationships, realized by the movement of the boy in relation to the viewer’s perspective as well as the movement of the camera itself. Returning to the opening shot of the film, Ivan quickly moves away from the web and out of the frame to the left just before the camera rises to the top of the tree. As it stops, Ivan reappears, moving back into the frame from the left but now at a considerable distance from his initial position. After he awakes from the dream these positions and movements are reversed. As the boy steps out of the windmill in which he has been hiding the camera is set at a distance from the character. Ivan again exits the frame to the left and quickly reappears in the immediate foreground, having completed, in reverse, the same elliptical motion found in the first shot of the dream. Within moments he is making his way through a dark swamp and there is another reversal of the opening shot. As Ivan approaches through the stagnant water the camera descends along the trunk of a dead tree, a counterpoint to the live birch of the first shot, and comes to rest as he negotiates a line of barbed wire; a negative and unnatural variation of the web framing his face earlier in the film. Thus, from the outset, the film establishes two inverse and, for the moment, divergent narrative planes. Motifs:
Mirrors and Matches –Tarkovsky uses mirror images as a narrative device, not only to draw a distinction between the alternative worlds of the film, but, in my opinion, to also create associations between Ivan and the Gal’tsev. From the opening frames of Ivan’s Childhood, Tarkovsky uses a series of graphic matches to actively encourage the viewer to link the two characters, despite their obvious differences on the surface. These matches, shots consisting of similar compositional patterns and elements spread out over the course of the film, repeatedly reinforce a largely unseen connection between the two and, perhaps most importantly, set the stage for the fusion of the characters in the film’s epilogue. The match I was referencing from the beginning of the film is actually the very first shot, which is negatively matched twice in the sequences that follow: Ivan is framed by the web and, a short time later, barbed wire. Jumping ahead to the epilogue, there is a similar shot of Gal'tsev, now in the ruins of Berlin, framed by a strand of barbed wire as he experiences his own variation of the waking dream discussed in the next section
Pacing – Tarkovsky also uses the pacing between cuts to help distinguish between oneiric realm and reality. Although the first shot of the film is 24 seconds, this is uncharacteristically long for a dream sequence. The next three shots last only 2, 8 and 4 seconds respectively. Generally, shot length on the realistic plane is considerably longer than in the dreams and though they are brief according to Tarkovsky’s later standards, the pace of editing is still far slower than what we find on the oneiric plane.
Music – Tarkovsky's choice of musical accompaniment contributes to the surreal feeling of the scene. Employing a softly texturized harmony of light flutes and plucky strings, the music is reminiscent of the science fiction orchestrations of Gustav Holtz. The lightness of the music contrasts with the stark silence Ivan wakes up to. This motif of soothing, gentle music during dreams and silence except for mortar explosions during reality is repeated throughout the film.
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