Cheap My Name Is Ivan (Video) (Eduard Abalov, Andrei Tarkovsky) Price

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Customer Reviews of My Name Is Ivan

What can I say?
I'd tell you to go out and rent it now, but most of you won't, if you bother to look at my review anyway. :-) And there are some that won't like it much. But I liked it a lot. It's very sad-- in the "there are 8 of us and we're all under 19" scene, where Ivan throws the knife, and imagines/feels traces of what happened in that room, remembers what happened to him, and just acts like a kid freaked out-- I didn't know if I should cry or what, it was very weird and sad. This film is very accessible, ultimately, and though there are confusing parts (hints of Tarkovsky's future path?), I think I "got" what mattered.... I highly recommend this film, and "Andrei Rublev"--- they reminded me of each other, actually, not just Irma Rausch, the actress with roles in both of them, and the kid that played Ivan (strange to think that he was 12 before my mom was born), but also the bell that Ivan lifts and rings, and the famous one in "Andrei Rublev." So, though Tarkovsky afficionados may say "Ivan's Childhood" is not as good as later Tarkovsky films, it's well worth seeing. It's also shorter than "Solaris" and "Andrei Rublev," almost relaxing.

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Who's in a Bunker?
Tarkovsky was fresh out of film school when he made this, and bursting with beautiful footage to use. From this he sculpts Ivan's dream world, which contains all he is living and fighting for, and the nightmare of war without.
The film explores sketchily charted territory of the human psyche. It will be fertile soil for your own pondering. If not a masterpiece, it is still a very expressive, eloquent film.
It would have interesting synergy with Thin Red Line.

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Ivan's File
Here is what Tarkovsky said about the picture: I attempted to analyze the condition of a person who is being affected by war. When personality is disintegrating then we have the collapse of the logical development, especially when we are dealing with the personality of a child. I alsways conceptualized Ivan as a destroyed personality pushed by the war from the normal axis of development. A lot, more than a lot, everyhting that was appropriate to Ivan's age was gone from his life, and in its place he was bestowed with evil endowments of the destruction that concentrated within him and seized him. The film was based on a striking short story titled "Ivan" by an obscure Russian author named Bogomolov, who himself probably was in SMERSH, a Red Army field recon and counter- intelligence during the war as much dreaded as Stalin's NKVD. Tyhe way the way the story waas written, it was probably inspired by true life experiences. Ivan himself could have been invented, or it might have been based on a real life incident, as there were a number of adolescents and pre-adolescents executed by the Nazis and martyred by the communists after the war. The story provides a lot of details into the running of military intelligence agents, the trench warfare and the role of secret police in totalitarian police in teh Red Army during the war. The story takes place in the trenches and gives good detail of the machismo of the Red Army reconnaissance scouts. The story gives a good description of life in a politicized army in a totalitarian country familiar to most older Russians, but not in such detail. None of that background made it on celluloid. The book reads like a personal tragedy for the kid involved, a feeling lost when the story was transferred on film, which was more symbolic. Here is what makes sense in the book, but is not made significant in the film: The two corpses hanging in the no man's land where the two scouts who were supposed to meet ivan at the Dead Tree who were killed in the ambush, mutilated, and hanged by the germans as a warning. The girl who flirts with the recon lieutenant is from a different story by Bogomolov, where an infantry lieutenant survives a frontal attack on the enemy trenches only to find out that his new fiancee was killed in the rear during the action. The Dead Tree to which Ivan runs in his final dream sequence is the extraction point which he didn't make the last time because of the german patrols. Ivan's surname in the movie in Bondarev, probably play on Bond. Were Bond films out in 1962? In the written story Ivan is a lot more human and is corrupted by the affiliation with elite soldiers and better food rations of an intelligence unit he is with. In the book the kid actually talks down on the exhausted infantry lieutenant who initially detains him. In the book are scenes of his adult friends corrupting him with nice clothes and other trinkets, which never made it into the screenplay, nor were there the scene of his handlers coaxing Ivan to go again behind the German lines when he gets scared. In the story, the narrator is the lowly lieutenant guy who tries the rescue the kid, and then learns of his final fate. In the story, incidentally, the kid is turned in to gestapo by a greedy peasant for a few bucks. All in all, the story is realistic and smacks of human tragedy, while the movie is a lot more symbolic. The film gets 5 stars though, because the film is one of the best representations of the mark that the War left on the collective Psyche of the people who lived in the Soviet Russia at the time. 1941 was the first year when the ration stamps were repealed and that spring was the first time in the decade perhaps that the people were looking for a summer of relative peace and prosperity, and then the war happened, interrupting graduations and honeymoons, starting another five years of major hardship. See if V. Bogomolov was translated into English. If he is not available on Amazon, try the Russian store, Four Continents in Washington, DC