Andrei Tarkovsky is hardly a director noted for making lightweight, easy to follow popcorn fare - often his films are rich and dense in symbolic and metaphorical content, with layers of meaning permeating his movies as if tempting the viewer to tease the "truth" out of the motifs and imagery. Despite the non-linear plot and use of flashbacks, Ivan's Childhood is perhaps one of his most accessible works, its comparative simplicity in no way diminishing its power. Ivan is a young orphan boy in war-torn Russia during the Second World War who discovers that his family have been killed by German soldiers and becomes desperate to join the army and fight. Made in 1957, the same year Kubrick made Paths of Glory, for a directorial debut it's a remarkable achievement, with Tarkovsky already demonstrating a knack for poetic imagery and highly imaginative and unconventional narrative style, as Ivan's exploits are interwoven with beautifully composed dream sequences. Praised by everyone from Jean-Paul Satre to Krzysztof Kielowski, Ivan's Childhood, like Grave of the Fireflies, views the savagery of war from the perspective of a child, but draws another saddening conclusion, one that speaks of children consumed by vengeance and violence, innocence lost forever.
