176 IVAN’S CHILDHOOD [russIAn: IVANOVO DETSTVO]
Third Reich. A brief montage derived from newsreel footage includes shots of the
ruined Reich Chancellery, the bodies of Joseph Goebbels and his children, and
German General Alfred Jodl signing the surrender documents (8 May 1945). We
learn from Galtsev’s voice- over narration that Capt. Kholin has been killed in
action. Galtsev also finds a dossier in the rubble of a Nazi government building
in Berlin showing that Ivan was captured and hanged by the Germans. In a final
flashback of Ivan’s childhood, he is shown playfully running a foot race against a
young girl on a sunny day at the beach. When he rushes up to a dead tree, the
film ends.Reception
Released on 6 April 1962, Ivan’s Childhood sold 16.7 million tickets in the Soviet
Union, making it one of Andrei Tarkovsky’s most commercially successful films.
Highly praised by critics, the film shared the Golden Lion with Valerio Zurlini’s
Cronaca familiar [ Family Portrait] at the 23rd Venice Film Festival (May 1962) and
also won top director’s honors at the 6th San Francisco Film Festival (Novem-
ber 1962). After it won the Golden Lion, Mario Alicata, the editor of L’Unità (t he
official newspaper of the Italian Communist Party), denounced the film as display-
ing “petit- bourgeois tendencies” whereupon Jean- Paul Sartre wrote an open letter
to Alicata, defending Ivan’s Childhood as “one of the most beautiful films I have had
the privilege of seeing in the last few years” and noted that “Ivan is mad... is a
monster; that is a little hero; in real ity, he is the most innocent and touching vic-
tim of the war: this boy, whom one cannot stop loving, has been forged by the
vio lence he has internalized” (Sartre, 1965). Ingmar Bergman, who had already
made many of his greatest films, would later describe his discovery of Ivan’s Child-
hood as “like a miracle.” Filmmakers Krzysztof Kieślowski and Sergei Parajanov have
also praised the film and cited it as a major influence on their work.Reel History Versus Real History
Though the story that Ivan’s Childhood tells is fictional, Vladimir Bogomolov based
it on his real- life experiences as an underage combatant (he reached official recruit-
ment age in July 1944, after having already been in combat for three full years).
Bogomolov’s story was not unusual. After the terrible defeats in the summer and
fall of 1941, the Red Army was desperate for manpower; many underage boys—
known as “sons of the regiment”— were allowed to join the army. Rus sian war
orphans like the fictional Ivan Bondarev were supposed to be sent to orphanages
but sometimes unofficially joined the Red Army or partisan units. Like Ivan, they
were usually used in reconnaissance roles.