Ivan's Childhood

In Ivan’s Childhood, Tarkovsky concentrates on the experiences of twelve-year-old Ivan, whose parents were murdered by the Nazis. Fuelled by hatred, the boy joins a group of partizans fighting the Germans at the front. Tarkovsky’s first feature-length film offers an unusual – by Russian standards – view of World War II. This is no conformist Soviet war film full of heroic feats of arms; rather, it is a work of socially committed, personal testimony. Ivan is a Russian boy who at the same time is a symbol of all children who become victims of war – a theme that is now all too relevant.

Garrett Bradley

This film is selected by American artist and filmmaker Garrett Bradley, whose exhibition is on display at Eye. About her film selection she says:

There exists in this constellation of films, something that shaped me as I emerged in the world, a terrible and beautiful symmetry—a series of visions that reflect not only the abyss of human ignorance and the convulsions of violent power, but also the quiet, stubborn radiance of resistance.

These sacred dispatches from the edges of human consciousness, are a bulwark against the erasure of memory. When art is silenced, the past is sterilized, the present flattened into obedience, and the future, a barren repetition of sanctioned myths. A singular narrative emerges, one that dares not confront its own ugliness, nor the courage to imagine beyond it.

These works are not mere entertainment (although some were commissioned as such); they are fever-dreams of our shared condition, how we stagger beneath the weight of history and yet still raise our heads to dream. I return to them again and again as a reminder that though the world is often cruel, our collective capacity to endure, to fight, and to imagine something better is a defiance so profound it borders on the sublime.