Recently, I watched a film in which space becomes a parallel script to that of progression of dialogue and plot. Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1962 work Ivan’s Childhood.
The young boy Ivan swims across a river from the Nazi camp to the Russian army checkpost. War is not for boys - he is told repeatedly. But he is convinced his skills will be useful in the war effort. With this minimal plot backdrop, let me elaborate on the frontier landscape in which the anxiety and adrenalin of the Russian war effort is played out. This geography is deserted. The camera moves slowly here. The splashing of water as boats move through the river are dramatic interruptions in the silent landscape. The dark, dimly lit quarters of the army checkpost add to the slownness of time. In the river, movement has to be fast and clandestine. In the eheckpost there is time to heat water for a shower. In the checkpost, there is some time for a vinyl record to play in the midst of manly banter.
In the forest, a young woman Masha flirts nervously with a Nazi Officer. She tightrope walks on a precariously perched log, and simultaneously, invites with her eyes and rejects with her words, the sexual attention of the officer. War unfolds as an important theatre for flirtation, excitement (like Ivan’s enthusiasm for joining the war effort), intrigue, a rush in adrenalin. These bare trees become the backdrop of Masha’s nervous adventure. As though they were inviting her to play out fantasies of a foreigner, while being wary of its acutal suggestion. This landscape does not suggest Russia or Germany or Europe in any identifiable way. It is a fantastic slice of nature that is deployed not just to show the theatre of war, but the theatre of human excitement felt intimately and viscerally in the backdrop of war.
Broken and cut edges of wood and metal interrupt the natural fabric of the landscape. This is inevitable as war is a kind of acquisition of nature, a kind of supreme apathetic dominance. Dominance for its own sake. Unlike the capitalist who domesticates nature to raise a factory or plantation there - turn nature into a specific motor of surplus extraction. The war treats this river, and associated forests and shrublands, as a spatial vessel to hold destruction. Nature serves as a graveyard.
I love broken things - especially metal. Their interruptive logic generates the jarring aesthetic of rock music. They are also remainders and reminders of a thing and a condition that used to be. They are alive and dead at the same time. They are ruins that can be held in one’s hand, like holding chunks of coagulated time.
Landscape is also dreamworld. The boy’s fears and traumatic memories of war and incarceration are arranged in a physical orchestra. Dream landscapes of a Nazi camp full of frightened children and a chute through which a bomb is darting down merge with the river and the forest. Ivan peeps into the chute with his dead mother at one point. In the next shot, he is at the bottom of the chute with a bomb charging at him.
In the end, I was left with this image as the lasting iconography of the film. Also the shuffling of the oars through the night river as nervous boatmen tried to go across to the Nazi territory. The night river emerges as a physical manifestation of a heart that is beating rapidly, but in imeasurable quietness.