A boy suspended among the branches of a birch tree, in an ecstatic flight that tastes of absolute freedom. A boy emerging from a muddy swamp, a feverish spectre with eyes burning with hatred. In this irresolvable dichotomy, in this tear between dream and nightmare, lies the beating heart and seminal greatness of "Ivan's Childhood", the dazzling debut of a twenty-nine-year-old Andrei Tarkovsky, who already sculpts in time his obsessions, his visual grammar, his metaphysical gaze. We are in 1962, in the midst of the Khrushchev Thaw, and Soviet cinema, after years of monumental and celebratory socialist realism, is seeking new ways to narrate the archetypal trauma of the Great Patriotic War. If Mikhail Kalatozov's The Cranes Are Flying (1957) had broken the ice with a subjective and passionate lyricism, Tarkovsky takes a further, more radical step: he internalizes the conflict to the point where it merges with the devastated psyche of his protagonist.

The film, inherited from another director and transformed into something uniquely Tarkovskian, is not a war story. It is a cinematic poem on the death of innocence, a requiem for a soul that History aborted before it could ever blossom. Ivan is not a child. He is a simulacrum, a twelve-year-old golem animated by a single, telluric desire: vengeance. Orphaned, a witness to the death of his mother and sister at the hands of the Nazis, he moves along the Eastern Front like an agile and elusive phantom, a priceless scout for the Red Army thanks to his small stature and feral determination. The adult soldiers who surround him—Captain Kholin, Lieutenant Galtsev—watch him with a mixture of admiration, dismay, and a desperate protective instinct. They want to send him to the rear, to a military school, to restore to him a glimmer of the normality that is forever denied him. But Ivan refuses. His childhood is not a place to be recovered, but a lost paradise, accessible only through dreams.

And it is precisely the dream sequences that elevate the film from war chronicle to universal poetry. Shot with a dazzling, almost supernatural luminosity, in a black and white that becomes silvery, they represent the only dimension in which Ivan is still a child. We see him with his mother beside a well (water, the Tarkovskian element par excellence, already a symbol of purification, memory, and a threshold between worlds), on a sun-kissed beach, or on a cart loaded with apples under a sudden, joyous rain. They are fragments of an Edenic existence, of an irretrievable past that contrasts piercingly with the reality of the front: a crepuscular and spectral landscape, made of flooded trenches, skeletal trees that look like claws reaching for a leaden sky, and the perennial dripping of water in the bunker. Vadim Yusov’s cinematography does not merely record, but etches the film stock with the precision of a burin on copper, rendering the tactile materiality of the mud, the wet bark, the rough wool of the uniforms. It is an expressionist world, seeming to emerge more from the characters’ interiority than from objective reality, a soulscape reminiscent of certain atmospheres of F.W. Murnau, where nature itself partakes in the human drama.

Ivan moves through this inferno like a little Hamlet of the Eastern Front. He is not driven by ideology or patriotism, but by the ghost of his mother, by a grief that cannot be processed, only avenged. His determination has nothing heroic about it; it is the fatal necessity of one who has nothing left to lose. This is what makes him so terrifying and moving. The actor, the very young and prodigious Nikolai Burlyayev, manages to convey this possession with a gaze of almost unbearable intensity, a face that is already a tragic mask.

Tarkovsky orchestrates the film on a constant counterpoint. The lyricism of the dreams against the brutality of the reconnaissance missions. The tension-laden silence of the swamp crossed at night against the almost domestic warmth of the scenes in the bunker. And, in one of the most powerful and meta-textual sequences, culture against barbarism. In a ruined church, Lieutenant Galtsev discovers German Renaissance engravings, including Albrecht Dürer’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. While the real apocalypse rages outside, the Soviet soldiers contemplate its artistic representation, created centuries earlier by the very culture they now identify as the enemy. It is a moment of dizzying reflection on the cyclical nature of violence and the capacity of art to transcend historical contingency to speak of universal truths. A gesture of pure intellect, one that anticipates the complex philosophical digressions of Andrei Rublev.

To venture a parallel, Tarkovsky’s Ivan is to the representation of war what Kafka’s Gregor Samsa is to the modern human condition. Both undergo an irreversible metamorphosis that alienates them from the "normal" world. Ivan is no longer a homo sapiens, but a homo bellicus—a creature specialized for and devoted to a single purpose, whose residual humanity surfaces only in the subconscious. He is an absolute, almost mythological character, like Melville’s Captain Ahab obsessed with his white whale, with the difference that Ivan’s whale is an entire army, an entire ideology that has devoured his existence.

The ending is a sharp blow, devoid of any catharsis. We are in Berlin, among the ruins of the Reich Chancellery. A young Galtsev, now hardened by victory, reviews the documents of the executed. And there, among the papers, he finds Ivan’s file. A mugshot, the face tense and proud, and the chilling bureaucratic notation: "Executed." Tarkovsky does not show us Ivan's death. He shoves it in our faces through the most impersonal of artifacts: a piece of paper. The last image we have of him is that joyous and vital one from his dream, as he runs along the beach chasing his sister. The break between the image of life and the chronicle of death is absolute, an abyss the viewer must bridge alone. Victory has a price, and that price is an entire generation, an entire childhood sacrificed on the altar of History.

"Ivan's Childhood" is not just the first masterpiece of a master. It is a work that, while containing in nuce all of the Tarkovskian cinema to come—the spirituality, the centrality of memory, the aquatic element, the dialectic between nature and ruin—possesses a narrative compactness and an almost thriller-like tension that the director would abandon in his later, more meditative and expansive works. It is a film that still dialogues with genre conventions in order to dismantle them from within. A work of heart-wrenching beauty and ruthless clarity, it remains one of the most powerful indictments ever filmed—not so much of a specific war, but of the very idea that violence could ever generate anything other than a desert of the soul. An indelible seal on the history of cinema, which reminds us that the most terrifying hell is to see the world through the eyes of a child who has stopped dreaming.