The beginning and end of this film were great. The in between was slow and drab. There is little action that occurs in between the end and beginning. And by the end of the film I just kept thinking to myself that it was approved by the Communist party of Russia. It falls in line with the usual declarations of the Soviet Union about the glorious war won against the Nazis. The ending jumps a little too quickly to the bunker where the Nazi leadership committed suicide. I thought that the plot should have made more of what happened to the soldiers.
Yet the films jumping from reality to dream to memory were very good. And the young boy Soviet spy dying in the end was unnerving. Still I think the film veers more into propaganda with some art sequences thrown in for entertainment. I can't imagine what Tarkovsky had to deal with in getting the film produced and screened in the Soviet Union. Censorship must have been heavy.
It is Tarkovsky's first film. I have also watched Andrei Rublov which is set in Medieval Russia. I didn't find that film all that great. I liked this film better. And I'm interested to see what Tarkovsky's other films are like that don't have the heavy hand of Soviet censorship weighing on it.
Russia is a great county. Yet merely ignoring the nuances of it's past don't yield art, it yields propaganda. And I disagree with Orwell's statement that all art is propaganda. Art is something more than propaganda. Ivan's Childhood is part art and part propaganda. I'm interested to see more Tarkovsky films and how they are produced under the auspices of the Russian censors.
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