Ivan’s Childhood was one of many Soviet films to examine the catastrophic losses of World War II through the prism of childhood, but Tarkovsky’s debut was immediately singled out for its visionary aesthetics, winning the Golden Lion at Venice and the praise of prominent intellectuals. Ivan is a child of the war, orphaned and running dangerous intelligence missions for the Red Army. He has “interiorized [violence],” in the words of Jean-Paul Sartre, a point Tarkovsky accentuates by interspersing the boy’s vivid recollections and dreams with his quiet hours waiting with two soldiers in the shadows of combat. The director’s dramatic rendering of landscape is already richly apparent in the film’s celebrated “dance of birches” and the flares tracing lines of light over a sunken lagoon.