Andrei Tarkovsky’s first feature, “Ivan’s Childhood,” from 1962 (which I discuss in this clip) is, in some ways, a conventionally patriotic Soviet-era war film, but the visual inventiveness that the director brings to the story is utterly personal and surprisingly spiritual, even transcendent. It’s no surprise that he had trouble with the Soviet authorities (which started soon—with his second feature, “Andrei Rublev”). Ingmar Bergman said that his “discovery of Tarkovsky’s first film was like a miracle”; it’s fascinating to imagine the influence of the ecstatic visions of “Ivan’s Childhood” on such works as “Persona” and “Shame”—and even, immediately, on the amazingly inflected and hallucinatory images of “The Silence.”
P.S. Here’s a 1962 interview with Tarkovsky on the site Nostalghia, devoted to the filmmaker’s work.
