MovieChat Forums > Ivanovo detstvo (1963) Discussion > Tarkovsky Sculpting Ivanovo

Tarkovsky Sculpting Ivanovo


What attracted me to Bogomolov's' short story, Ivan?

I have to say at the outset that not all prose can be transferred to the screen.

Some works have a wholeness, and are endowed with a precise and original literary image; characters are drawn in unfathomable depths; the composition has an extraordinary capacity for enchantment, and the book is indivisible; through the pages comes the astonishing, unique personality of the author: books like that are masterpieces, and only someone who is actually indifferent both to fine prose and to the cinema can conceive the urge to screen them.

It is all the more important to emphasise this point now, when the time has come for literature to be separated, once and for all, from cinema.

Other prose works are made by ideas, by clarity and firmness of structure, by originality of theme; such writing seems not to be concerned with the aesthetic development of the thought it contains.

I think Bogomolov's Ivan is in this category.

Purely artistically, I derived little joy from the detached, detailed, leisurely narrative with its lyrical digressions to bring out the character of the hero, Lieutenant Galtsev. Bogomolov attaches great importance to the accuracy of his record of army life and to the fact that he was, or tried to appear, a witness of all that happened in his story.

All this made it easier for me to see the work as prose that could readily be filmed.

Moreover, filming might give it that aesthetic intensity of feeling which would transform the idea of the story into a truth endorsed by life.

After I had read it, Bogomolov's tale stuck in my mind; indeed, certain things in it impressed me deeply.

First there was the fate of the hero, which we follow right up to his death. Of course many other plots have been constructed in this way, but it is by no means always the case, as it is with Ivan, that the denouement is inherent in the conception and comes about through
its own inner necessity.

Here the hero's death has a particular significance. At the point where, with other authors, there would have been a comforting follow-up, this story ends. Nothing follows. Usually in such situations an author will reward his hero for his military exploits. All that is hard and cruel recedes into the past. It turns out to have been merely a painful stage in his life.

In Bogomolov's story, this stage, cut off by death, becomes the final and only one. Within it is concentrated the entire content of Ivan's life, its tragic motive power. There is no room for anything else: that was the startling feet that made one unexpectedly and acutely aware of the monstrousness of war.

The next thing that struck me was the fact that this austere war tale was not about violent military clashes, or the ins and outs of reversals at the front. Accounts of exploits were missing. The stuff of the narrative was not the heroics of reconnaissance operations, but the interval between two missions. The author had charged this interval with a disturbing, pent-up intensity reminiscent of the cramped tension of a coiled spring that has been tightened to the limit.

This approach to the depiction of war was persuasive because of its hidden cinematic potential. It opened up possibilities for recreating in a new way the true atmosphere of war, with its hyper-tense nervous concentration, invisible on the surface of events but making itself felt like a rumbling beneath the ground.

A third thing moved me to the bottom of my heart: the personality of the young boy. He immediately struck me as a character that had been destroyed, shifted off its axis by the war. Something incalculable, indeed, all the attributes of childhood, had gone irretrievably out of his life. And the thing he had acquired, like an evil gift from the war, in place of what had been his own, was concentrated and heightened within him.

His character moved me by its intensely dramatic quality, which I found far more convincing than those personalities which are revealed in the gradual process of human development, through situations of conflict and clashes of principle.

In a non-developing, constant state of tension, passions reach the highest possible pitch, and manifest themselves more vividly and convincingly than in a gradual process of change. It is this predilection of mine that makes me so fond of Dostoievsky, for me the most interesting characters are outwardly static, but inwardly charged with energy by an overriding passion.

Ivan turned out to be a character of this kind. And when I read Bogomolov's story these things took hold of my imagination.

However, that was as far as I could go with the author. The emotional texture of the story was alien to me. Events were related in a deliberately restrained style, almost in the tone of a report. I could not have transferred such a style to the screen, it would have been against my principles.
Bogomolov describes the settings with the enviable thoroughness of one who witnessed the events which form the basis for the story. The author's one guiding principle was the detailed reconstruction of all the places, as if he had seen them with his own eyes.

The result seemed to me fragmented and lifeless: bushes on the enemy-occupied bank; Galtsev's dug-out with its dark lines of beams, and, identical to it, the battalion first aid post; the dreary front line drawn up along the river bank; the trenches. All these places are described with great precision, but not only did they arouse no aesthetic feelings in me, they were somehow uncongenial. These surroundings were not such as to awake emotions appropriate to the whole story of Ivan as I pictured it. I felt all the time that for the film to be a success the texture of the scenery and the landscapes must fill me with definite memories and poetic associations. Now, more than twenty years later, I am firmly convinced of one thing (not that it can be analysed): that if an author is moved by the landscape chosen, if it brings back memories to him and suggests associations, even subjective ones, then this will in turn affect the audience with particular excitement.

Episodes redolent of the author's own mood include the birch wood, the camouflage of birch branches on the first aid post, and the landscape in the background of the last dream and the flooded dead forest.

All four dreams, too, are based on quite specific associations. The first, for instance, from start to finish, right up to the words, 'Mum, there's a cuckoo!' is one of my earliest childhood recollections. It was at the time when I was just beginning to know the world. I was four.

Quite unexpectedly it occurred to us to have negative images in the third dream. In our mind's eye we glimpsed black sunlight sparkling through snowy trees and a downpour of gleaming rain. Flashes of lightning came in to make it technically feasible to cut from positive to negative. But all this merely created an atmosphere of unreality.

What about the content? What about the logic of the dream? That came from memories. I remembered seeing the wet grass, the lorry load of apples, the horses, wet with rain, steaming in the sunshine. All this material found its way into the film straight from life, not through the medium of contiguous visual arts. Looking for simple solutions to the problem of conveying the unreality of the dream we hit on the panorama of moving trees in negative, and, against that background, the face of the little girl passing in front of the camera three times, her expression changed with each appearance. We wanted to capture in that scene a foreboding of imminent tragedy. The last scene of the dream was deliberately shot near water, on the beach, in order to link it with the last dream of Ivan.

Returning to the question of the choice of locale, it has to be said that our failures occurred precisely at those points in the film where associations suggested by the experience of specific places were pushed out by a piece of fiction or as a result of meekly following the script. That was what happened to the scene with the crazy old man and the burnt-out ruin. I don't mean the content of the scene but its plastic realisation. At first the scene had been envisaged differently. We pictured an abandoned field, swollen with the rains, with a muddy, waterlogged road running over it. Along the roadside—stumpy, autumnal white willows. There was no burnt-out ruin. Only far away on the horizon stood a solitary chimney. There had to be a feeling of loneliness hanging over it all. A scraggy cow was harnessed to the cart carrying Ivan and the old madman. (The cow was from E. Kapiyev's memoirs of the front.) A rooster was sitting on the floor of the cart, and some heavy object lay there wrapped up in dirty matting. When the Colonel's car drove up Ivan ran away over the field, as far as the horizon, and Kholin had to spend a long time chasing him, barely managing to drag his boots out of the clinging mud. Then the Dodge drove off, and the old man was left alone. The wind raised a flap of the matting to show a rusty plough lying in the cart. The scene was to have been filmed in long, slow shots, and thus to have quite a different rhythm.

Not that I settled for the other version for reasons of efficiency. There happened to be two versions and I didn't realise until later that I had chosen the less good of the two.

There are other unsuccessful passages in the film of the kind that arise as a rule when the moment of recognition is not there for the author and is therefore equally lacking for the audience. I spoke of this earlier, in connection with the poetics of memory. One instance is the shot of Ivan walking through the columns of troops and army vehicles, when he is running away to join the partisans. The scene awakes no feelings in me, and so the audience can experience none in response. For the same reason the conversation beween Ivan and Colonel Gryaznov in the reconnaissance section is only partially successful. The interior is indifferent and neutral, despite the dynamic of the boy's excitement. And only the medium shot of the soldiers working below the window brings in an element of life, becomes the stuff of associations, of thought that goes beyond what is stated.

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Wow, thank you. I recognize the first (blue) excert from Sculpting in Time. Where are the other two from? Great stuff.

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From the same book.

Google Books -

http://tinyurl.com/cgy76r

http://tinyurl.com/ctvpzz

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Thank you, I thought that might be. A good book to re-read

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Thankfully, this post is still here, over eight years later. Wonderful.

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