|
Ivan Got His Gun. Fuller once declared that the only way for cinema to truly depict war was to spray the audience with bullets, here's the next best thing. Nazi devastation of Belarus sets the stage, the Exodus and the Apocalypse are the poles: The 12-year-old protagonist (Aleksei Kravchenko) digs up a rifle and eagerly runs to join the partisans in the woods, Elem Klimov proceeds to wipe the smile off the wannabe warrior's face. Left behind, the boy spends an incongruous idyll with the forest nymph (Olga Mironova), dewy rainbows and all, before a squashed bird's nest points to the onset of the inferno. A ruthless Steadicam skims supernaturally pale meadows, a full menagerie (stork, cow, lemur, lobster) adds to the surrealism. The sound design is an assault of shrieks, moans, detonations and the hum of a ruptured eardrum (plus "selections by Mozart"), the boy attempts to escape it by shoving his head into the mud. ("Didn't I tell you not to dig," asks the living corpse.) It builds to the barbarous spectacle of villagers scratching at the walls as the church they've been crammed into is set ablaze by raucous Germans, and to the child's terror-wizened face as he's forced to pose for a snapshot with pistol to temple (the photographer takes his time winding the camera). Brueghel, Guernica, Rousseau's La Guerre. Dovzhenko's frenzies are remembered (i.e., the gassed soldier's cackling in Arsenal), Kubrick's numb survivor "in a world of shit" is foreseen. The "revulsion of the mind and exhaustion of the spirit" Ernie Pyle wrote about are lent bludgeoning viscera by Klimov, who pointedly reuses to soothe trauma with catharsis—Hitler is the grimacing slime effigy and the "liberator" portrait, but also the toddler perched on a maternal knee, daring you to bring your hatred to his level. With Liubomiras Laucevicius, Vladas Bagdonas, Viktor Lorents, Jüri Lumiste, and Yevgeni Tilicheyev.
--- Fernando F. Croce |