Rev Left Radio - "Ivan's Childhood" by Andrei Tarkovsky: The Children are Always Ours...

Episode Date: August 26, 2024

Join Breht, Amanda, and Evan as they delve into Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky's first feature film, Ivan's Childhood (1962). The episode starts with a lighthearted discussion about dream dinner guests, then moves into a detailed analysis of themes like innocence lost, war trauma, and symbolic elements such as trees and cobwebs. The hosts draw parallels between the film's depiction of war and ongoing humanitarian crises like those in Palestine. Part of their Tarkovsky series, this episode also touches on broader issues like moral responsibility toward children and insights from the guests' personal work. Check out our other two episodes on Tarkovsky's "Solaris" and "Stalker": https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/size/5/?search=tarkovsky   Amanda Joy Moon: ⁠⁠Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amandajoymoon/ ⁠ Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/shop/riotgrrrlprintz/?etsrc=sdt ⁠⁠ TikTok⁠⁠: https://tiktok.com/@amandajoymoon   Left of the Projector Links https://www.patreon.com/LeftoftheProjectorPod https://boxd.it/5T9O1 https://leftoftheprojector.com https://instagram.com/leftoftheprojector   ----------------------------------------------------- Get 15% off any book in the Left Wing Books Library HERE Support Rev Left Radio Follow Rev Left on IG 

Sit back in your seats, get something to eat. Watch this movie. Don't like to see it. Well, we'll let you hear the video. Thank you. Hello and welcome to Left of the Projector. I am your host, Evan, back again with another film discussion from the left. If you would be so kind as to rate the show on your platform of choice, it would help more listeners find the show.

and if you're a Patreon subscriber, I greatly appreciate your support. You can also support the show if you go to Patreon slash Left of the Projector Pod. You can also follow on all social media at Left of the Projector Pod on Instagram and threads. This week on the show, we continue our series with Brett of Rev Left Radio and Amanda on the films of Andrei Tarkovsky. You may know by now that we've covered Stalker and Solaris, and we bring you the first feature film directed by Tarkovsky, and that is Ivan's Childhood. It was released in 1962. Ivan's childhood delves into World War II from the perspective of a young child who has lost his entire family and is now spying for the Soviet partisans and Red Army. Brett and Amanda have been incredible partners in its ongoing series,

helping me parse out honestly films that scholars have spent decades talking about. I've grown a deeper understanding of film and these sorts of films from the Soviet Union, Eastern Block and other areas. It's really been a enjoy to have these ongoing conversations with Amanda and Brett. I hope you enjoy this week's conversation on Ivan's childhood. All right. Well, Brett and Amanda, thank you for coming back on the show to talk about yet another Tarkovsky film. Always a pleasure. Yeah, absolutely. I'm happy to be back. Yeah, and as everyone heard in the opening there, we're talking about Ivan's childhood, which is Andre Tarkovsky's first full-length feature film, which came out in 1962. And I think before we get into sort of the general talk about the film itself, talk about some of the components that I think

are pretty important. I thought we kind of just talk off as start off with something a little lighter as, you know, Tarkaski films are a little, can be a little heavy, a lot of themes. And this one is about the kind of the themes of World War II in the Soviet era. So I thought I started off by just saying if you could have dinner with an actor, living dead, could be a director. Curious who you would pick and, you know, I guess briefly why you would choose them. And it could be Andre Tarkovsky. Okay. I could take a shot

of this first. I have maybe one director is pretty obvious. You know, Stanley Kubrick is one of my faves. Love everything that he's pretty much put out. 2001 of Space Odyssey, one of my favorite films of all time. So, you know, of course I'd be interested in talking to him. But as

an actor, one of my favorite actors that jumps to mind and is somebody I'm trying to work through the sort of, um, you know, all the, the entire catalog of their work is, is Daniel Day Lewis. Um, only very recently started getting into him, um, on a couple of flights I had in the last year or two. I, I, I watched the entirety of, of, of his portrayal of Abraham Lincoln. And then also finally watch there will be blood. Um, and I'm just, you know, one of those actors that is fascinating and captivating. I'm not sure what there'd be to talk about. I mean, you know, some of these people, you get them in a room and, you know, they're a great artist or

they're a great actor, but, um, they might, um, they might. might not have a lot of the same shared interest, but, you know, that jumps to mind. And then, of course, Nicholas Cage is another interesting figure that I would like to, I would like to sit down and chat with. I think he would have something to say, Nicholas Cage, for sure. Absolutely. What about you, Amanda? First, the first director that comes to mind is Ingham Berman.

He's a Swedish director. He did the Seventh Seal, wild strawberries, a bunch of stuff. I, I speak Swedish. I learned Swedish in college. And so a lot of his films helped me learn. And it's kind of interesting that this film in particular really reminds me a lot of the Seventh Seal. If you haven't gotten an opportunity to see it, I'd highly recommend it. And then as far as actors, like, this is a hard one because it's hard to decide.

I want to know what kind of person they are. I think kind of an offhand one would be like Richard Geer, mostly because of his experience going to Palestine and just kind of have a sit down conversation with him. Because as you know, like actors are used oftentimes to push state propaganda and, you know, it's really propaganda in this case. And it kind of backfired. So I really would like to have a conversation with him to kind of see where that switch was, you know. And obviously Nicholas Cage, I'm trying to piggy back off of you. That guy, like, so I live in Portland and he filmed a movie here called Pig, great movie. And we were kind of like, looking for him, hoping that we'd run into him. And, you know, because we heard that he's notoriously bad with money. Maybe he would like hook us up, you know, because he thought we were cool or something. Yeah, we actually ate at the food carts yesterday that a lot of the scenes are filmed at. Or, yeah, the food carts. And yeah, just a centric guy, you know, very

centric guy. Yeah, he's definitely a legend. I was just talking about him with someone earlier from his new movie Long Legs. But for my pick, since I kind of have to think about this lot, I think I would pick for the actor, I think I would go with Jane Fonda, just because I've seen a lot of her early work, and I know that just from a movie

I watch, and I'm blanking on at the moment, she was supposed to be cast in a film, but was not chosen because of her views on Palestine as being pro-Palestinian. And so she was left out of the she wasn't called back for the for the movie and so you know she's since the beginning of her

career has gone out and spoken been pretty outspoken about not just Palestinian rights but lots of other you know the various Vietnam War and things like that so be curious to see how those have influenced her career and then from a director if I'm going to pick one of each I'd probably go with Paul Verhoeven I'm a huge fan of his you know more I guess American films you can think of Starship Troopers and he's always been a favorite mind so he would be probably probably one of those. In another episode, I said Stanley Kubrick, so I don't want to repeat, but that would be another, I would love to. These are all, I mean, it can't really go wrong, I suppose. I don't know. This is probably for the, exclusively for the terminally

online, but did you recently see the Zionist online, the Brianna Wu, her take on Starship Troopers? That is not a mockery of fascism, but it's actually a sincere portrayal of nationalism. Did you see that? I did see that. I remember when the, There was this whole, I guess it was on Twitter and some other people were talking all about Starship Troopers. And I did one of my very first episodes of this podcast, maybe the 15th episode was on Starship Troopers and I re-released it around the time that all of that kind of discourse is going on. I'm like, I don't know how anyone could watch that movie and not get it.

It's like you have to be just obtuse to not, I don't know. It's, it's kind of crazy. I think there's a lot of movies I've done, you know, a lot of all Verhoven movies like Robocop, I think people even don't realize is this... One honorable, one just jumped in my mind. Humphrey Bogart. I would love to sit down and chat with him. He's a, I don't know, I just love the old, you know, film noir's and just like a certain

feeling you get when you watch those old films. And I just have always been captivated by any movie that he's in, just his acting and stuff is hypnotizing. So he's high on my list. As far as Tarkovsky's concerned, we've kind of stuck with some of the original two episodes we've done. We've done Solaris and Stalker, some of the later films in his career. Now, this, we're going back to 1962, which is Andrei Tarkovsky's very first feature film. And there's kind of an interesting story that I'll kind of briefly mention just how he

ended up directing the movie. Apparently, it was an entire other group of people, a different director was starting on the film, had written the screenplay, had I think filmed some of the movie and they didn't like it. They thought it was terrible, I guess, these are most films. or other people behind the scenes. And so they fired him. And someone that was one of Andrei Tarkovsky's mentors had told him about they're looking for a new director for this movie. And he literally applied through some kind of application process,

one, the chance to direct it, rewrote most of the film. And then when he submitted it to the Soviet Union to have it be reviewed, he actually left out all of the dream sequences and also the love, kind of the love interest scene from the script. So they didn't even know those were going to be in the movie. he filmed them anyway. It came out and kind of the rest is history, if you will. But I'm curious, being that this is a very different kind of movie than the other two we've watched, and those are kind of longer, lots of single shots. This is more or less traditional and kind of a, put that in quotation

mark, because I don't think anything Andre Tarkovsky does is traditional, but in a traditional sense of just kind of how more films at that time were done. I'm curious, kind of your first impressions when you watched it before we get into it. I think one of my first impressions is, that I guess you don't really see a whole lot of war films that aren't glorifying war and also are from a Soviet perspective. One thing that I could see throughout it, even in like the character's eyes, was like trauma. The trauma of the war and even one of the soldiers is like, oh, when the war is over, go see a doctor about those nerves, you know? But I think, I think, I'm really glad that we did this out of order, just because this is such a different film that it's not a complete

representation of Tarkovsky and his capabilities, but it is kind of sort of a creation story at the same time. I mean, the Soviet identity dramatically changed after World War II as, you know, any traumatizing event would. But yeah, that's my first impression. Yeah. I agree that watching them out of order was interesting because you got to, you sort of already know where where his sort of cinematography and his art in general is going and then you can go back and visit his first ever film and one of the things that I noticed is the beautiful cinematography is absolutely there this this very unique Tarkovsky-esque way of moving the camera of every image being a painting of you know beautiful beautiful camera work where you know this film could

could have been a silent film right there could have been no dialogue and not a lot would have been stripped away. Like, you could have made this film without dialogue, and that's a testament to how, you know, just talented Tarkovsky is and how much emotion that he can evoke with very little dialogue just by using the visual poetry of cinematography. And then the other thing I noticed that really struck me as is the basic plot. Like, if you, you know, from our previous discussions on Solaris and Stalker, there is much more ethereality, um, much more surreality, ambiguity in the plot, in the temporal tone, like, you know, the chronological order in which the movies take place, you know, sometimes you can sort of, you're sort of uncertain about where the plot is at any given moment, etc. But this film was much more straightforward, much more, you know, right down the, right down the middle as far as plot goes, right? Very chronological, very easy to follow. And of course, I think that that has its benefits when you're, you know, trying to to work on concept like war. And of course, this is his first film, so maybe he doesn't feel as

artistically developed or free to move in the directions he later would move in. But yeah, for a Tarkovsky film, this plot was very easy to sort of follow. It was very chronological and lacked some of the more, you know, I wouldn't call them indulgences necessarily, but some of the more ethereal, metaphorical, and symbolic stuff that would come later in his in his catalog of work. It's interesting you mentioned that because I was watching an interview with an author who wrote a book on a bunch of Tarkovsky films. And she actually said, you know, she's obviously probably watched it hundreds of times or many times to write a book on his films. But she actually said something that's interesting. This is not as like counter to what

you're saying, Brett, but it's wondering what do you think of this. The very opening scene of the movie is kind of, you see Ivan as the child, kind of, he's, you know, on an apple cart. He's, It's, you know, this very beautiful, nice kind of music in the background. It kind of seems like, oh, this is a very beautiful film. And then you're immediately taken the opposite direction. You see that this is now a dream. He wakes up in like a barn and he's, you know, he's dirty and everything. And so her eye theory or her comment was that you actually, watching it only one time,

you are a little bit confused sometimes what is the reality just because the cuts that he does sometimes are not very, you know, obvious. they just kind of immediately flip. And so there is a little bit of confusion sometimes when there is a dream. I think if you're watching closely and looking to analyze it, maybe it's easier to tell. But I'm wondering if you think that that's actually, he does try and confuse the audience a little bit

in giving you these weird back and forth sequences. And sometimes when he cuts, it'll be like a really close up and you don't really know where you are. You don't know whether it's going to be another flashback or it's a different flashback or it's modern time. So I think that's where you see his future style. in action where he does still try and give you that bit of kind of give the audience something they're not expecting I guess

yeah no I agree with that and in fact I had in my notes I didn't get to it quite yet but with the exception of the dream scenes um you know because I think like you're saying that there's that's the seed of what would later become kind of in some respect entire films is this dreamy ethereal um you know chronologically sort of confused and ambiguous way of doing things those were sort of instantiated in these dream scenes And yeah, the cutting back to real life and back to the dreams, it did get confusing at certain times, especially on your first watch. I'm sure if you go back on the second watch, you can really nail that down. But for me, it just felt like this, you know, it's literally a shift from dreaming into reality, but reality is a nightmare. And so he has these dreams of a sort of childhood deferred. Are they actual memories from his childhood, or are they sort of dreamy reminisce, you know, sort of nostalgia for something that never was because he was stripped of his childhood. I don't exactly know. But the dream world is the only world that Ivan can enter where he still has a

childhood. And then he wakes up into the nightmare of the adult world, you know, lost both his parents, lost his sister to the Nazis. And so I had that dream reality back and forth. And yeah, they blur together the way that they're edited or such that you don't exactly know exactly where you are in any given moment. It takes a second to orient yourself. And there's just this, yeah, this oscillation between the dreams of a childhood that Ivan and all children deserve and then the nightmare reality of war. Yeah, definitely. I think that's well said. And one of the things I was thinking about, I've seen, I think when I was right after college, I went through a phase of watching lots and lots of war movies, World War II, Vietnam.

Maybe not at the time I wasn't watching movies like this. But I think of how many movies there are about World War II. And sometimes it's a, you know, a specific unit or, you know, a rescue mission or the, you know, the beaches of Normandy, all these different things. But this is not any of those things. It's kind of something all together different. It's based on a book. And it's, you know, we see the war through the eyes of a child going back and forth, as you said, between kind of the realities, the cruel reality of the real world and war and then the, you know, this dream or, you know, what you wish life could be like. I'm curious what do you think that makes it, you know, it's, in a way, it's risky to make, make something like this. It's not like other war movies. And I'm wondering what makes

it, I know, compelling or what makes it different? And do you think it is, can you think of any other, you know, war type movies where they really kind of press this button of, you know, childhood and youth or even just avoid, there's no battle scenes. There's no, the only shooting you really see are flares in the air a few times and you hear some gunfire. But there's no actual war. Like, you're, you're only seeing the result of war. Well, there is, there is some bombs that do go off. I actually rewatched it. And I was like, oh, yeah, there's, there's some bombs that do go off when they're in like the trenches, kind of about three quarters of the way through, I think. Right. But that's pretty much it. The perspective of like being from, it's more humanizing. I think it's not, the movie's not so much about like the war as

much because it's just a lot of dialogue and a lot of human interaction. Um, I think it's like the emotional part of war, I guess, the trauma, as I stated before. And doing it through a child's perspective that is forced to be part of the resistance, forced to sacrifice their actual childhood to seek revenge. And throughout the film, you notice that, like, the older characters are trying to kind of, like, maintain his innocence, trying to maintain his childhood in a way of, like, no, kid, you need to go to military school, you know? like you need to go boarding school or whatever um and so it's just a very humanized uh aspect which is something that actually was starting to happen a lot in soviet film in the 60s um and so yeah that's i guess that's what kind of makes a difference not specifically about because you don't really actually know where they're at um if they are in russia i mean at the end you see that they're at you know

wherever the headquarters of all these Nazis are. I really like the use of real scene footage towards the end when they, you know, took out the Nazis. That's just always exciting. But yeah, it's a very humanized aspect. Yeah. And to add to that, you know, definitely movies jump to mind. There's like the classic American way of doing these World War II sort of movies, which I think

Evan was alluding to, very straightforward, very much like, here's this one platoon, let's follow them, you know, saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk down, you know, kind of like action movies that don't really get too deep into, I mean, they're good films in their own in their own right, but they don't really get too deep into, you know, the psychology, much less, you know, these sort of different lenses, like a childhood lens, for example. Speaking of Kubrick, you can think of full metal jacket, which, you know, had a obviously humor that this film lacks, but also just the psychology of the soldiers themselves that dove a little deeper while still. having that action element. So it was a fun watch, but also a criticism of the war in and of itself and a diving into like, you know, that one soldier who goes sort of crazy and, you know, blows his own brains out. That, that psychology there. But this is very unique that it's so much through the lens of a child, of a war orphan, right? He was orphaned by the war. This dream sequences, as I was saying earlier, that allude back to the childhood he might

have had at one point or should have had in a just world. And then, you know, to Amanda's point at the end, when there's like that footage of, of, you know, the Soviets winning and taking over Nazi headquarters, etc. I think it's, it's not a coincidence that Tarkovsky again shows dead children. He shows how the Nazis killed their own children. So there's that one scene of gerbils lined up next to all of his dead children and then another Nazi commander, I'm not sure who they were referring to, who shot all his kids in the attic and then hung himself. And so, you know, when we're talking about seeing it through the childhood lens, obviously the lens of Ivan and from a pro-Soviet, which any human beings should have in this context, especially a pro-Soviet, you know, perspective. But then at the end, like, yeah, Nazis are are brutalizing children by starting this war, brutalizing children all around Europe. But the Nazis themselves are sort of brutalizing. their own children in a sense, right? They start this insane manic war

for these fascistic expansionary reasons and it all leads with their defeat and then to murder your own children. I think there's a separate question there of, you know, it made me think in the moment, like if you're in those circumstances, like wouldn't you still want to give your kids a chance at life? Like, you know, like, yeah, you're going to be punished.

You can kill yourself, etc. I guess there could be some fears about, like, you know, pillaging or something when the Soviets come in. There's lots of discussion on both sides of that war about the atrocities being committed by the others. There's a little fear there that maybe death is less of a punishment for your children than what could come. But in most instances, you can't imagine entire platoons of people coming in and just, you know, murdering children unless they're Israeli or something. But as sad as that is. But yeah, just the moral question of murdering your own children, but that's not really pondered in the film, it's just the stark reality of the war itself traumatizing Ivan and other children like him, but then the Nazis themselves exterminating their own children and just like that reinforcing that lens of trying to see the absurdity and the irrationality and the brutality of war and the way you highlight. that best is to try to see it through the eyes of fundamentally, you know, sort of ontologically

innocent beings, you know, children. So I found that to be interesting. Yeah. I think it was the first word that I wrote down in my notes. I wrote, you know, a child's wonderment and innocence. And that kind of to me is the word that describes the movie as you, I think, I think you Amanda said, the people, the other soldiers want Ivan to have kind of a quote unquote normal life. where he can keep this innocence, that they want to prevent him from continuing to be this sort of spy behind enemy lines. And it's just, I think what makes it such a different kind of war film, it takes place during a war, but I don't, I almost don't even like to say it's a war film in the, you know,

the wave we've been talking about it. It's that innocence that they're trying to withhold. And that's what those kind of those dream sequences are showing you. They're showing you that once upon a time, Ivan did have this innocence. He loved his mother. They went apple picking. They picked water from the well. They had this sort of normal life.

And it's the war that kind of took that all away. And he's led him to being bitter and angry and want vengeance to do whatever he can to avenge, as you said, being an orphan. He's lost that innocence. And, you know, there's lots of moments throughout the movie where they try and give him, they try and give him a bunch of comics or, you know, kids, you know, kids magazines and he saw I've read all those and, you know, all the attempts to try and give him, you know, any sense of normalcy is just always just stripped away. And I think that's part of the impact of war is that

you can, you know, shield yourself, even like those Nazi children, you know, they're kind of shielded from what's going on. But at the end of the day, they also suffer. Everyone suffers. To add to that, the way that the older soldiers are portrayed is also obviously, as Amanda was saying, incredibly humanizing, but they all were rallied around the shared love and protection of the boy. And there's like this broader metaphor of, you know, a whole people trying simultaneously to shield the boy from the terrors in the sense of like you should go to school, not be on the front lines. But also at the same time, just doing whatever they can to protect. the boy, and there's a deeper sense that in war, like, this war is happening in some sense to protect the future, to defend everything that is most sacred and holy for a community, for a nation, for a people, which is represented in their children, which is, you know, the future of this entire society, this way of being. The Nazi children were killed in the end. The Nazi regime was coming to an end. And for the Nazis, for Goebbels and Hitler and, you know, all these others, they were picturing this thousand-year And their children, you know, these air, you know, trying to breed these Aryan, you know, children to have this, this future that they imagined. That was destroyed by them starting World War II and ultimately losing it. And so I can see the dead Nazi children at the end as kind of reminiscent of that as well. But the soldiers, the lieutenants, protecting this boy, spending so much time trying to protect him, trying to put him on a right path, even though the context in which they're operating in, that sort of impossible, I think was a kind of a beautiful element of the film. And you can't watch this film. And I mentioned Israel earlier sort of flippantly, but don't get me wrong. Like, you can't watch this film without thinking about what's going on in Palestine right now and

that this exact trauma is being inflicted on children en masse as we speak. You know, some recent numbers coming out of Palestine suggest that over 150, 180,000 human beings. have been murdered at this point. And Gaza is 50% people under 18 years old, so children. And so you're talking tens of thousands of children and the ones that are surviving often will be missing one or both of their parents. Many have lost their entire families, their entire extended families. And that's why, you know, we talk about Israel as the Nazis of our time. They're perpetuating the same sort of brutality and cruelty. And it's the children of that society that that really bear the horrors of it because they're sort of fundamentally innocent and the least capable intellectually to deal with that.

And so, you know, I did think about Palestine the entire time. And the last thing I'll say on this point is it reminds me of this James Baldwin quote that I think really kind of gets at what we're talking about here too. Baldwin said, quote, the children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe. and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality itself. And I've always loved that quote. I think it's beautiful. And I think it really speaks to what we're talking about here in seeing the children of humanity as our children, all of our children. And that anybody with a developed, mature sense of morality needs to see the children of the world as not Palestinian children or Arab children or Russian children or Russian children.

German children, but as human children that we all have a deep responsibility for. And one of the ways in which that responsibility is completely abandoned is when we bring down the horrors of war on top of the heads of fundamentally innocent children. Absolutely. And all wars are always a war on children. Yes. And it also makes me like going back to how the Nazis, you know, they killed their own children. You know, there is a line, you know, like any loss of life. is a tragedy but like the lot like killing kids fucking like beyond anything you know but you know I think about like with Israel like you know one of the hostages was returned safely after the father thought his daughter was dead and he was actually kind of like relieved thinking that

she was dead because it's that that mentality that it's better to die than being taken hostage because of just the generations and generations of hate being taught, which is very reminiscent of how, you know, children of the Nazis were taught to think about Jews, you know, and the Henneble Directive is something that has now been shown to be implemented on October 7th, and it's just, it's the parallels are just, you can't not recognize it. It's, yeah.

Absolutely. And how Zionism itself teaches children from a very young age to hate Muslim, Arab, Palestinians, to dehumanize them. And so you have like these interviews that come out sometimes of young kids, you know, just regurgitating the most insane, fascistic, anti-human rhetoric as if it's just common sense. Because this fascistic settler colonial society has inculcated. this barbarity into the minds of their children, which in and of itself is a form of brutalizing children, which your own children, by teaching them this hatred, this fundamental division, this dehumanization of the other, that is also child abuse. You're literally murdering Palestinian children and you're sort of stunting or murdering the psychology and the moral development of your own children to keep this fucking insane project going. And it's just, it is absolutely disgusting. And the fact that so many people, people in this world, especially, I mean, in the imperial core in the West, seem to lack moral

clarity on this point is just absolutely fucking astounding. And, you know, people that really fancy themselves intellectuals and morally deep thinkers, you know, I mean, Sam Harris, for example, wrote an entire book on morality and how we can root morality in a sort of scientific objective of basis or whatever. And he's just a full-on Zionist. And, you know, these people are fucking sick in the head, but they fancy themselves like truly deep moral thinkers while they do everything but condemn the mass slaughter of innocent human beings, families, and importantly, children. So it's just stark to see that, you know, in real time. And just from a, from like a personal note, just as people maybe have, maybe I mentioned

other episodes and across a episode with Intervention Pod where we talked about kind of the having myself grown up as a Jewish person, going to a Jewish school, and being pushed all of these Zionists kind of lies and myths, maybe not to the point of seeing, you know, Muslims and Arabs as lesser people, but, you know, going to Israel, participating in a multiple day IDF program. I mean, they very much, I mean, I won't go too deep into this. It could spend a whole hour as we did. But it's very easy to see how, you know, you can create these, these myths about people. And you could see how, when I think about those Nazi children that are, you know, killed at the end, I mean, they would perpetuate the same lies and beliefs about Jews that the

Jews are now, you know, going and doing it, you know, against Arabs and Muslims. So it's really just a pattern, too, where it's also impossible to separate that. I hate to use a word conflict, but what's going on in Palestine and Gaza to this movie. So I'm glad you both brought it up and I think it's an important point. Yeah. There's also this Naomi Klein quote. I'm sure you all have heard about it and sent her book Doppler, which I haven't fully read, but essentially saying that the Zionist's like mentality that is taught is not the freedom

of oppression, but the freedom to be the oppressor, something like that. I'm kind of butchering it, but that's definitely like on par. The way we were taught about all of the various wars, the Yom Kippur War, the 67, all these different ones, was that Israel, of course, was the victim and had to defend itself as we see being perpetuated to this day. But on a separate note, kind of about the, there's one theme that I'm going to wait on it because I think it's, I'm going to leave it alone. And that's, although maybe it does kind of fit into.

What I'm going to mention now is I saw an article online that referred to Ivan's childhood as a film about kind of like the tree of life. There's lots of moments in this movie where I think trees are very intentional and important to the plot. And I think it goes into something else I had seen about it, talking about the movie as kind of a, can be viewed as this different form or these various forms of dualities, the child's idealism versus kind of the cruel reality of war, which I think we've already talked about. But I think it's very interesting to look at that perspective when it comes to how they use trees. So the very opening scene, you see some apple trees and you see Ivan sort of floating above the trees. And then immediately they show him kind of at root level, literally where you see dirt and roots of those trees from the ground. And then it flashes, you know, to the current time. And several times throughout the film, there is a scene in a grove of birchwood.

Birchwood trees, yes. There's a couple of scenes in a field of Birchwood, and then there's also a moment when Ivan wakes up from one of his nightmares or dream sequences, and he immediately sees a, there's a log of a Birchwood kind of behind him before it kind of brings you back to reality. And then at the very kind of the last moments of the movie, you have him going through the swamp on the German side, you know, through these large trees that are just growing in muck and dirt. And they're kind of having to get their way through into the Nazi side, you know, maybe representing the evils of the Nazis. So I'm curious if you noticed any of those aspects of trees in the internet at all. And if there's anything to that, you know, I don't put anything that Tarkovsky does as accidents. And especially also brings me to kind of my questions. that you could also answer a part of this is there's this sort of random moment around 30 minutes in of this little love story amongst Masha who's a nurse and her, you know, commanding officer or a commanding officer that seemingly doesn't really fit into the rest of the movie. It's kind of like a little mini vignette that's, I mean, I'm curious what you both think to see if it doesn't fit or if it does fit. But it takes place in that birch field and that moment where the, the, the general,

the lieutenant kisses Masha is over sort of a pit where you see the kind of the roots of those same trees. So all of those things kind of fit together to me as something and I'm not maybe sure what it is. Well, on the topic of Birchwood, just doing like I was really curious about because I was reading your notes and I didn't really notice like how prominent they are throughout. I mean, even like one of the cabins or the shelters is made out of that same Birchwood, I think, right? And so I kind of was like, okay, what's the symbolism of this? And so I think, like, Birchweid is, I guess it's a pretty prominent in Russia. It symbolizes femininity and fertility, warms, kindness, peace, tranquility, and harmony. They use it a lot in paintings and art and stuff

like that. And as you said, like Turkowski is nothing is accidental. So I think that, that, yeah, just kind of like, okay, so the best way I could like compare it is, um, so I'm Mexican and like, um, we're, we're all about corn. Um, maize, you know, we come from the corn. Um, it's a really, it's a staple of it's like how our people survived. There's like entire analogs written about tortillas and, um, I've read them all. Um, but I think that it's kind of like with that, you know, like, um, Birchwood is like a symbol of Russian pride, Russian, Russian, I guess nationalism, whatever. I tread lightly on that because that could be taken one way or another.

But I just kind of think of it as like, yeah, that's like the symbol of Russia, of the Russian identity, I guess. Yeah, that's interesting. For sure I didn't know that had that meaning and those sort of cultural signifiers in that society. That's fascinating. Yeah, I mean, I always love one of the best things about watching. a Tarkovsky film is this profound eye for nature that he has, how he, in every film that I've seen of his so far, has these long lingering scenes where he keeps the camera on nature, is always sort of placing human nature in the broader context of the natural world writ large.

There's an interesting, this is one of those things I'm not quite sure what to make of it. As Amanda, like, you was alluding to, like, you know it means something, but you're not quite sure. in the very opening scene Ivan is in like this you know I think it's a yeah one of those forests and he comes face to face with like a spider web and is sort of like you know interested in it whatever and then later in the film Masha

walks by like a tree that's the exact same type of tree and kind of freaks out about cobwebs and steps back and she's like I'm only scared of spiders so they're sort of like this this natural thing this spider this spider web it's at one it's at one point delightful for the child um that is uh sort of innocent in a way of like not of just sort of like you know garden of eden style innocence and then as a later more developed mature

person um learns that this is a is a threat or a danger and can kind of jump back from it again not quite sure what that means but probably something he's trying to say there um with the with regards or i'll get to the love the love thing in a second with with masha and the kiss but one quote i found very illuminating regarding Tarkovsky and how he does images, as we're wrestling with the meaning of certain things. There's this quote where he says, quote, we can express our feelings regarding the world around us either by poetic or by descriptive means. I prefer to express myself metaphorically. Let me stress. Metaphorically, not symbolically. A symbol contains within itself a definite meaning, certain intellectual formula,

while a metaphor is an image, an image possessing the same distinguishing features as the world it represents. An image, as opposed to a symbol, is indefinite in meaning. One cannot speak of an infinite world by applying tools that are definite and finite. We can analyze the formula that constitutes a symbol, while metaphor is a being within itself. And it falls apart at any attempt of touching it, end quote. So I think that's kind of interesting. And in that regard, if you would take him at his word and then assume that he's doing that here. There is sort of a non-meaning. It's just sort of meant to be an image that evokes feeling

and tries to get at the infinite and indefinite sort of aspects of human life, which I found very interesting. You know, Kubrick is different. I think Kubrick does a lot of symbols. Like, Kubrick is putting things in his film that have definite meanings. He's trying to get you to catch on to these little Easter eggs of meaning. And it's sort of interesting to think of Tarkovsky, as we've described him in previous episodes, as a sort of anti-Cubric in a way, where he just like steps back from even that meaning and just sort of just has the image itself playing a role. So it's really, really hard to say. I'm interested to hear what both of you think about it. But I'll get to the Masha point in a second if either of you have any thoughts on that.

Yeah, we can, yeah, that's kind of a separate. I just brought them up because of the moment when they're in those trees. But yeah, I think the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the. The. that I didn't fully finish reading it, the kind of where it talks about the trees of life. It also actually mentioned the spider moment you're talking about, too. And I really like that line that she's only afraid of spiders. You know, you're literally in a war scenario against the Nazis. And the thing you fear is spiders. You don't fear, you know, you don't fear Nazis.

You don't fear all these other things. But I think that the, you know, the, it seemed like all of the different trees did have different kind of just the way they looked. And I think that quote kind of puts that into light is that they, evoke different things in those different times. You also see the scene where they go across the river and they see several of their comrades had been hung. They're hanging from a tree.

I don't know if I recall what kind of tree it was, but now you see that moment. I think there's also a time when Ivan is talking to that sort of older man, you know, outside of the ruins of his house and he's looking for a little nail to hang up a picture, which is also a really great scene we can also talk about. And I think there's a moment where they show a tree behind it, too. So there are all these moments where they use these trees, not simply as symbols, but to kind of evoke something as you're watching it. And I think they're, you know, as Tarkovsky does in all of these,

in all of the movies I've seen, it's just, it makes you, you can watch it three different times, I think, have three different feelings each time you watch, you know, those scenes, but I think is what makes it so, uh, them so powerful. But I don't know if you, if you have something to add a man, if we can, uh, if not, I guess we could talk about the kiss too. Yeah. Um, you know, Brett, I didn't actually really put two and two together with the cobwebs, like in the beginning with Ivan and then with Masha. And, and now that I'm thinking, like, taking that and like, oh, that's that, that's got to mean something, you know, there's a few things, a couple of things that I think about with that, like cobwebs. I think about, um, how in order for a spider to build a cobweb, there has to be some sort of calm, um, and time, uh, you know, a short period of time. I, I don't really know where I would go with that, but I just, how do spiders build cobwebs?

That's my ADHD brain. Like, oh, that's going to be researched later. But I also think about Ivan and Masha, like those two characters, like Ivan, and I don't know, I know that Masha's older, but she has such a childlike quality to her, like also, like, I guess, an air of innocence that Ivan also have. And they're kind of both on kind of like different reactions. to the war. Like, I don't really know what she does. I guess by default, she's kind of like a nurse or something, which is kind of very gender specific, but whatever. And, but those two, those two

characters, I just really feel like they both have an air of innocence to them. And it's, don't feel like it's too much of a coincidence that they both encounter cobwebs at different points where he sees it and then she runs into it. Yeah, we could walk, we could probably make a whole podcast just that. Totally. Yeah. I was just going to add one thing. There's actually, I'll link to this article, I think is pretty fascinating.

There's one moment when Ivan is walking through a bunch of kind of the ruins of a house and all of the pieces of wood that are kind of broken apart look very much like a web, which again can't be, you know, has to be intentional or it's kind of the same visual kind of sense. And so I think there must be more to that too, that, you know, I think is fascinating. But yeah, go ahead. Yeah, there's this oscillation with the trees between the delicate nature of them

and the brute nature of them. So, like, I think of, um, the cobweb, obviously being like this delicate structure that is pinned to a tree that even a strong gust of wind could sort of disturb the delicacy of that, of that web. And then Masha sort of when they're out in the forest, uh, with the lieutenant,

she's sort of like nimbly walking on one of the branches and walking back down it, um, sort of in this very like balance. balanced and delicate way. But on the other hand, you have like the nooses. So on the same sort of, you know, a tree can hold the delicacy of a spider web. It can also have the brute force of hanging somebody by the neck until they die. And then when they're in the swamp sort of like at nighttime or on the edge of the river and the marsh at nighttime, doing their little operation, as it were, towards the end of the film, one of the trees just tips over in the water. And, you know, you have all like the artillery shows. in the background or the flares or whatever and then you just have this huge tree fall over and it doesn't get it come close to the boat but there's just this brute nature of it falling splashing in the water making this huge impact and so again this sort of oscillation between the delicacy of nature the the delicate limber balanced form of it and you know the way that human beings can use or

destroy it at the same time so i thought that was interesting and the other thing i wanted to say with regards to Masha and the little love situation they have here, which you said that some people criticize as sort of, you know, being irrelevant or unnecessary, I kind of see it as one deepening the, the personal character of the lieutenant. You can see this other aspect of him outside of simply protecting Ivan or simply playing his role in the war. But also, there is this tension between the two lieutenants that are watching over Ivan. I don't know if they're lieutenants, colonels, whatever, captains, the younger one and the older one, where the younger one does seem to have some tension with regards to Masha, but never overtly tries, never makes a pass at Masha, never makes it clear that he's flirting with her. But when he finds out that her and the other lieutenant are out in the woods together, he starts running after them. And I'm not sure what that means. There's like almost a fear in the way that he runs. Is he running to break up some sort of, love scene, is he worried that Masha might be in danger in the hands of the other captain or

lieutenant when they finally meet up, the two men, nothing is really said, nothing is said between them, nothing is made clear. But it's just sort of a question mark of why the younger one runs in to the woods with such ferocity, only to find the other captain and not really do much about it. So I don't know exactly know what that is. There seems to be something like a brewing love triangle there, but also that is subordinated, between the two men at least, with their shared goal of like protecting and caring for Ivan. And perhaps to make that love triangle, an overt thing that causes division between them would put into a compromising position, their shared goal of protecting Ivan. So I don't know, I was just kind of playing with those ideas. And if I'm on the

right track there, then, you know, that's not, that's not a meaningless aside, but that is a sort of deepening of the overall narrative that Tarkovsky is purposely, uh, trying to do and show us. So I think also the, the younger lieutenant or whatever he is, I kind of also get the impression that because they seem like they're close in age, that there's some sort of kinship with that. I don't know if it's romantic or if it's just, you know, because it's someone that is his age, um, But there's also been criticism that the scene was like sexual assault, you know, borderline sexual assault. And, you know, I hate to be like, well, times were different then, but times were different then. People's perception of what's romantic.

And I looked for, you know, in watching that scene and then she runs into her old college pier. she looks longingly into the forest looking for perhaps the younger guy, perhaps the, what's his name, Holon, Holon? Holon? Yeah, Holon. Yeah, Holon. I think they pronounce it like Holon or something like that. I don't know.

I think to say, like, I see comments like online because I follow like the Tchaikovsky, like Instagram and he posts like video clips or they post because Tchaikovsky is dead. They post video clips And they posted that scene Some people are like Oh, so romantic And other people are like Sexual assault

And it's like I don't know You know Never read the comments But sometimes It is And I think you also I don't know if you mentioned this

Evan But I think you mentioned your notes About it being like Oh yeah you did About how he like Kind of scoops her up And they're kind of over This Abyss type

This trench kind of deal I don't know I don't really know what to make of it but it does feel a little strange the scene does feel a little strange because of like I don't know she seems like she's not really into it but then she seems really into I don't know it's like it's a little uncomfortable

but I don't know the trench aspect the trench aspect I think makes it what I think is probably the most interesting aspect I mean it's kind of I don't know the scenes maybe eight minutes long something like that But one of the very opening scenes with Ivan is you see him kind of walking along sort of a trench area. There's kind of a, I think it's right before in this very opening dream sequence to kind of show the roots of the trench or something like that.

To me, it almost seemed like Masha being sort of saved or kept innocent in the same way they want to keep Ivan, you know, his innocence, you know, from falling into kind of like the trenches of war. Maybe it's, you know, if she was romantically involved, she could, you know, leave the war and not have to be, you know, be part of it anymore. And I don't know really what to make, Brett of the lieutenant running to me. It also felt like this weird fatherly instinct or brotherly instinct. I mean, I know they're the same age, so fatherly doesn't sound right. But initially, the lieutenant doesn't seem to be wanting to care for Ivan. It's kind of like this weird thing he has to do. He doesn't even really believe he is who he is, that he's this spy for the Soviet. And then over the course of the rest of the film, he becomes protective of him, helping him, you know, trying to watch out for him and eventually go along on his final mission with him. So I think maybe the lieutenant's running because he's, you know, has that same protective feeling of Masha as he does for Ivan. So I don't know. I also don't think the scene is, you know, out of place. I mean, it feels slightly out of place, but I don't think that the meaning and what it could be is, I think it would be a service to not have it. Yeah, hanging over the ditch and kissing, yeah, you can make many different, um, it's a, it's a fascinating image where she's just sort of dangling over the abyss and he's, you know, grabbing her, holding her up and kissing her. Something about the impulse of love or the, the romantic ideal, even in the, in the brutality of war. But yeah, it's, it's like, is she just playing coy or is, like, this, like, sort of a creepy-ass situation? It's kind

of hard to say. Um, you know, there's probably a, I mean, this is the 60s and 70s. I mean, this is the 60s, I'm not exactly sure what you can expect from male directors at that time, but there's probably almost certainly a feminist critique of Tarkovsky's portrayal of women in general. I remember, I believe it's in Stalker, where the wife was just very hysterical and fraught and didn't have a lot of dimension to her personality, and Masha has this similar sort of one-dimensional, you know, very naive, almost like reducing the woman to a child, you know, in a sense was being done here. Again, 60s and 70s, male directors, patriarchal societies, I'm not exactly sure what to make of it, but there is a sense in which I don't feel like Tarkovsky, at least in the films I've seen, maybe I could be wrong. I certainly haven't seen his entire catalog, but that women don't really play incredibly strong or dominant roles whatsoever. And so that, you know, that's probably room for criticism there. But, but yeah, I don't know. It's fascinating scene, and it was, it was, I heard somebody describe it that scene where they're kind of like dancing in the woods like slow motion dancing they're twirling around each other she's walking up the um you know the balance beam of the tree and walking back down um hiding behind trees you know um it was a beautifully shot and sort of choreographed a scene for sure um but again it's it's really hard to uh squeeze specific meaning out of it

yeah i think that's i mean yeah none of i don't think anyone could uh accuse tarkovsky of uh of any of the scenes not being, you know, shot and lit and all of the things, aspects of it. But, yeah, I think you're right, though. I've seen one of the biggest criticisms is females. There's never any female protagonists in any of his films as far as I can think, at least not a lead protagonist. I mean, there's some characters like in Solaris, the wife. But another thing that's, actually, Amanda, you brought this to my attention or you mentioned

this to me, and I hadn't given it as much thought. I think this goes back a little bit to the conversation comparing this to the conflict in Palestine and Gaza is the, we learn about the Soviet partisans, sort of this resistance movement that, you know, aids the military and has kind of kind of runs its own little operations. And that's kind of how Ivan becomes involved with the Soviet army. It seems like he was working with them, you know, one of these groups because he was angry that he had lost his entire family. And, you know, there is some cooperation. I don't, I don't. I'm not, I'll be honest, I'm not deeply familiar with all of the, you know, the workings of how the collaboration went along with the, you know, the Red Army and these groups. But I do think what you said, Amanda, is interesting about how that group, the partisans could be viewed as this sort of resistance or revolutionary group. And, you know, maybe from that perspective, Ivan himself is sort of like a young revolutionary doing the things he can do, risking his life. You know, he doesn't seem afraid of death at this, you know, at any moment in the movie. maybe there's a couple scenes when he's having these kind of nightmare dream sequences as he's waiting for, you know, to go out on his missions. But I don't know how you make of those things. And if either

of you know more about the partisans, I'm curious how it might fit in. I tried to do just some brief research on the partisans. And I do have to note that one of the things that I notice most, especially researching online from the Imperial Corps, is that there's always this reoccurring narrative of like resistance groups being rag tag or useless or ineffective. I forgot like what some of the highlights are, but it does kind of remind me of when you go look up the Filipino like New People's Army that's been around for what 50 years now, one of the first articles you'll see is like, oh, 48 years of doing nothing or you know, just kind of thing. And I think that I mean, that's intentional. Of course, you know, creating a narrative when words are a minefield. But I did, yeah, like I would really like to do more research. I don't know, Brett, if you know more about the partisans with your time with like guerrilla history. I'm sure you probably have the episode. But yeah, that's just something I wanted to note.

Yeah, I'm not sure if we have ever done an episode on Partisans in particular. Certainly would be worth doing one. have much to learn about the Soviet partisans in particular, not super well read on exactly what they did. But what I do know just from general understanding of history is that in the context of an invasion, partisans or the sort of civilian guerrilla fighters that work alongside or in sort of a dialectical back and forth with conventional military strengths are sort of like a natural emergence. You can think of it in the Bay of Pigs situation. You can think of it in Vietnam. You can think of it in the Spanish Civil War. It wasn't necessarily an invasion. It was a civil war. But, you know, left-wing areas being invaded by right-wing

forces. And partisans were a natural emergence to that. So you think about it in the Soviet context, you have this expansionary Nazi war machine coming further and further east, you know, committing atrocities as it goes, you know, and coming into your territory, it's a natural response for people who are not part of the conventional military to begin to just do their own operations, their own ambush attacks, their own forms of resistance. I mean, you can look in what was put up against the American invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, a very similar situation. So I think in any context in which there is an invasion of a homeland by another external force, there are going to be the emergence of these sort of naturally organized

militant guerrilla warfare-esque groups who start to, who begin to resist. And, you know, that's clear. Now, the degree to which they work with, the conventional military, I think that can probably differ, depending on certain contexts. There could be probably more hostile relationships. But for what I understand about the Soviet partisans, there wasn't a hostile relationship between them and the Red Army. There was a funneling of intelligence, of weapons, etc. And they saw the partisans as they, a crucial part of the overall fighting force. So yeah, I see the partisans as a good and really a natural force that emerges in the face of invasion. And you see it over and over, shit, even going back, you know, to the American

Revolutionary War. You know, you didn't really, you had the development of something like a conventional military on behalf of the American colonists, but, you know, guerrilla warfare tactics were definitely used and the sort of rag-tag guerrilla ambush, you know,

groupings were a huge part of their initial assault against the British. So yeah, any context of invasion, this sort of thing is going to emerge naturally. And I think that's, that's very interesting and, you know, definitely we're studying more. We should do an episode on that at some point. The only thing I did find in my, also I didn't have a lot of, I didn't get a chance to do much digging on it. But apparently a large amount of the partisans that involved in sort of the in Ukraine part of the Soviet Union were actually formed through the interior minister, interior ministry of the Soviet Union. So it wasn't necessarily just, you know, a bunch of, you know, it could have been just some farmers or random people banding together and, you know,

going across enemy lines to kill Nazis or, you know, stop them. But I think it also, there was aspects of it being an organized thing beyond just those kind of areas. So to your point, Amanda of, you know, yes, there probably was a combination of sort of rag-tag groups of people, but then also, I think it became very organized at some level because it does seem in Ivan's childhood that there is some coordination because they had a meeting point. I think we mentioned another tree references that Ivan was supposed to meet that specific tree where he would then be able to be brought back to the partisans. And I think we see that the partisans, was it the partisans who are hanged or is it the soldiers? I don't remember now. I'm not sure.

But either one of them, clearly there's this coordination. So it is a fascinating thing that, yeah, I don't have too much other context. And I know at the beginning, we talked about some of those real-life footage. You mentioned Amanda, the using of actual footage from, you know, Victory Day. And, you know, the way that the film is kind of shot is it sort of kind of cuts off from the actual incursion, Ivan's last kind of mission that we see to Victory Day, a time of celebration. But I think something that maybe is very well depicted in this is you have that celebration and all these different shots of how it is great that defeated the Nazis, you know, that the Soviets, let's be clear, versus the American involvement. Of course, they had some involvement, but I don't need to go that far. But I think it's, I really like how they created this, they show, you know, the prison that the lieutenant enters where he finds out that Ivan had died. and you see a guillotine, you see the ropes for additional hanging.

So you do see victory, but you are very clearly shown the cost of war. I don't remember the exact number, but something like 30 million Soviets died. Maybe it's way more than that. Maybe I'm way underselling it. But countless millions of men and women died to defend their country. and I just like the way that it's depicted at the end that there is no happy ending and then maybe after we get your impressions on

that I do want to talk about the very last scene too So towards the end of that okay first of all war is a racket like that's why I always think like war is a racket and there needs to be more people talking about how the Soviets did when you know outside of our bubble of people like people that actually

understand and comprehend and care about history um but one of the scenes that i aside from like the real footage of them like just defeating the nazis taking over one of their headquarters is the scene where there's all these like books and files like strewed all over the place and they're you know taking bundles and it pans out to this scene where there's kind of like on the left side of the screen i took a picture of it but there's a left side of the screen there's a left side of the screen there's like, I think maybe like an eagle holding the Nazi symbol. And they say, and the dialogue just really stuck out to me, he said, won't this be the last war on earth? See a doctor about your nerves, Galston. That's like the young guy again. But Holon, you were killed and I'm alive. I think

I must think of persevering peace. And I think, you know, aside from the very last scene, that really encapsulates a lot of the theme of the film and yeah I just wanted to mention that I don't know where I was going with that but Wars racket and building off of that one thing I was thinking about was

this quote that's been going around on right wing you know social media circles and Joe Rogan made a big deal about it it's this absurd sort of thing where they talk about you know hard times create hard men, hard men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create bad times, right? We're all aware of this sort of thing. And there's this, um, one, there's this irony that people like Joe Rogan who, you know, live this incredibly comfy life, has been a millionaire

since his early 20s, um, you know, has never faced any sort of violence of this type at all whatsoever, um, puts himself mentally in the category of, of, of hard men, right? All these, all these conservative dorks, um, who, who, who think in this. way are sort of immediately assuming that they are the hard men even though they live these super coddled relatively comfortable lives and I saw one of these figures I think it was bronze age pervert one of these again these fascist sort of dorks that are very big and right wing social media circles um what they'll often do and and I think BAP did this explicitly is just like sort of fetishize war as like super important for the development like you know people who these

All these people have not never been to war, but they precisely because they haven't lived in war, they fetishize it and romanticize it as a way of, you know, adding dignity or maturity or meaning to people's lives. And they, you know, this is, it's this in, it's this thing that you can't take out of human nature. It's deeply ingrained in human nature. And it's, we're alienated from our ability to go ransack the next village or, you know, go to war for a cause bigger than ourselves. And these are always uttered by, by, you know, weak men. men, men that live very comfortable, coddled lives because other people before them have fought and died and been traumatized and brutalized and created a world, at least for a time, where that they can be okay to fetishize war. But anybody who's actually been in war, they're not romanticizing war. They're not fetishizing it. They're doing everything they can to never go back there. And it also makes me think broadening out of our own disgusting bourgeois politicians who have never seen a war they don't want. I think of figures like Lindsay Graham, John Bolton, Nikki Haley, fucking John Federman, right?

And you can go down, you can, I can keep saying names for the next hour and a half. We all know who these people are. These people who themselves are, have never fought and would never be asked to fight, constantly beating the drums of war, wanting to create wars, bomb countries, bomb Iran, give Israel everything they need, use Ukrainians as a proxy for your fight against Russia. these people who just see human lives as chess pieces they can move around aboard and who get some sort of psychological gratification from beating their chest in this egoic way where they think that they're these war hawks and these tough-nosed realists who live these lives of complete luxury and comfort all of them millionaires all of them surrounded by basically servants and staff doing their bidding they don't even have to do their own grocery shopping and yet they're so willing You know, just frothing at the mouth, wanting to create war after war after war. And all of these people are the weak men that that quote is getting at while they think of themselves as tough men. And then you look, or tough people in general. And then you look at the actual depravity of war who actually suffers. I mean, just look what's happening right now with Palestine, mothers and families and grandmas and entire bloodlines being eradicated. toddlers being sniped in the head, you know, medical supplies being so non-existent that you

have to do deep surgeries without anesthetic. Starvation used as a weapon of war. And all of these people have full bellies and they're uncomfortable air-conditioned houses, fetishizing and romanticizing, brutal wars that as they speak are being brought down on the heads of innocent human beings. And so I just wanted to point out that glaring hypocrisy and to sort of ponder for a second, the sadistic and absurdist psychology of people who think and fetishize like this. And we as communists, as people on the radical left, we want humanity to mature

beyond class society and beyond war. And I don't think you can ever mature beyond war without maturing beyond class society, without those divisions amongst a people, amongst the nation, rich and poor, but also globally. Those incredibly skewed dynamics of the incredibly poor and the incredibly rich, you know, that entire system, I creates the context for more war. And I think it's not, it's not a part of our human nature any more than any negative low base element of our evolution as part of our nature. Like chimpanzees often rape people or, you know, rape other chimps. This is a part of our evolutionary history from lowly beasts. right does that mean that it's some in inextricable part of our human nature to always be like that or can we use our reason and our capacity for deep reflection and moral development to grow up beyond the need to act

like that um and so anybody that says that you know class hierarchies are natural to or are just you know inextricable from our human nature or that war itself can never be transcended um i'm always incredibly incredibly suspicious of the sort of people who seem committed and need that to be true. Um, I do believe in the capacity for human beings to evolve beyond these things. And I think it's, it's really our obligation as sentient, you know, moral and rational beings in the, and self-reflective beings in the cosmos to grow the fuck up beyond that. Um, and I, and I hold out hope that one day humanity will. Are you saying that these guys playing call of duty didn't, uh, make him into real men that could, uh, withstand that same world. Like,

that's honestly like, exactly. That's all it is for them. It's, yeah, it's literally a game. to them and yeah it's uh not to like bring up another movie but to bring up another movie um i don't know if either one i'm i know you i know you've seen i don't know bret if you've seen civil war the a 24 film that came out um like in the spring oh not yet not yet um there there is kind of some parallels with that with like the the war monger from his high tower um and the final say i don't want to ruin it for you see um but uh maybe you should go watch that after this um but there are some parallels right there with that with that point of you know reality you know uh is portrayed in that in that film with nick offerman's character who plays the president of america um i think they

i don't even know if they called the united states i think they just called america but uh yeah there's there's some parallels there with like the man in the high tower you know um the the soldier that is so brainwashed into dehumanizing other people that don't look like you, that they sit in a nice comfortable room and push the button on the drones that kill entire families or people at weddings and in shelters. But, you know, that doesn't make strong, strong men, you know, men, men, women out in the field, doesn't make them strong just like it doesn't make a child strong to get beat up by their parents. It makes them traumatized. It makes them angry. It makes them, you know, resentful, it makes them not the whole human beings that they could have been,

not to say that they won't ever have that potential, but it is definitely a stunting of maturity in humans and individuals. But, yeah. Well said. Yeah, I think, I guess before we finish up, I wanted to, since in the other episodes, it makes sense we talk about the very last scene, and I'm curious, kind of your, maybe your impressions, and I've seen some different things written about it.

So the final scene after we get the Victory Day and we learned that Ivan had been killed, you know, by the Nazis during the war, we get a kind of a dream sequence or some kind of vision sequence where you see Ivan and his sister, presumably, playing sort of hide-and-seek on a beach, and it's, you know, very similar, reminiscent of very opening scene, kind of a very, you know, symmetrical opening and closing of the movie by Tarkovsky. But the thing about it is that Ivan at this point is dead. So I'm curious, this may be kind of a pointless exercise in like what your theory or how you would look at it is. Obviously, it can't be from his perspective as a dream sequence because he's now dead. But some things I've seen say, you know, maybe it's more of a perspective of the sister or the mother or

this is the vision of what the lieutenant would have wanted, you know, Ivan to have been able to achieve, you know, had he not had to have been involved in the war, had there been no war. So it is this sort of idyllic ending to it. And I think it's a better ending than having it kind of be that, you know, slightly darker, depressing, you know, seeing all the horrors that the Nazis have, you know, have committed. So, yeah, I wonder what you all think of the last. The last scene. I mean, you know, there's no way to know for sure, but I can kind of think of it not from a specific person's point of view, but from a universal sort of zoomed out perspective, like a sort of non-individual perspective, a perspective of humanity itself of just sort of reflecting on the fundamental innocence and the childhood that could have been, should have been, would have been, if not for the horrors of war. And it's just sort of a sort of sad, nostalgic almost, you know, what it's. if in a sense and no single individual is dreaming that or thinking that. It's just like zoomed out like the eye in the sky is thinking it or reflecting on that maybe. But one thing it harkens back to is that that earlier quote that I read from James Baldwin about all the children are ours and the moral responsibility and obligation that that imposes on all of us who are not children, who are adults. And, you know, some of us have children, some of us don't have children, some want children, some don't want children, but I think we should always be suspicious of

anybody who is disdainful of children as such, whether that is the explicit overt form of supporting wars or fetishizing, romanticizing wars, or funding and arming groups of people who are specifically going after children as the U.S. is doing right now, or even in the more low level ways where people just sort of have this disdain for children, this sort of like, you know, like, oh my God, they're, you know, that term from like 10 years ago, like crotch goblins or, you know, I would never, I could never imagine myself having kids. They're just annoying little, you know, shitty messes or whatever. And whether you have kids or not, it's a totally valid personal choice. But I would urge everybody, no matter if you have any

kids in your life or no kids in your life, to try to take seriously. lead this Baldwin idea that all the children are ours, and that just by virtue of being a human adult, you have an obligation and responsibility to try to create a world in which children aren't brutalized. And that starts with having a love for children is sort of it being synonymous with the love for humanity, because we're all children once. And there's that fundamental beautiful possibility and hope that is, you know, present in every child because they represent the future, there's this fundamental innocence, this best of our nature, this, this open-eyed curiosity about the world around them before it's sort of been beaten out

of them or drowned out by concepts, et cetera, that we should all have this obligation and think of all the children as ours and to have this loving, nurturing, feeling towards children and wanting to create a better world, not just for ourselves, and not even just for our own children, but for children as a whole, for humanity's children. And I really take that responsibility seriously as a father to my own children, but as a human being to try to fight for a world in which all children are safe and all children get a childhood. And, you know, when you see these incidences of war, when you see what's happening in Palestine, because that's the most concrete example currently happening, all the children in Gaza and in Palestine are being robbed of a

childhood. They're being brutalized for this, you know, 75 plus year old European nationalist colonizing project. You're, you're destroying babies and lives and futures for entire family lines and lineages because of some concepts you have in your head about God's chosen people and whose land this really is, et cetera. And it is so, it is so absurd and so immature. It's like, there's a deeper level of immaturity on behalf of people who think like that and who can do that than children themselves, right? We see children as underdeveloped or immature. But in some deep sense, you know, the real immaturity and the underdevelopment come from the adults who brutalize them, whether that is interpersonal abuse or wartime destruction or anything else. And so, yeah, I just want to like one of my last notes is for everybody to take seriously.

that Baldwin quote, and to think about creating a better world where that obligation to humanity's children is taken seriously on the individual and collective level. Absolutely. Another thing that I think about that we also have to understand that it's not normal for people to have to hold up their dead children to get people to care. Like, I personally do not have children, but I weep daily for. for the children that I see every single day that are brutalized. And additionally, those that do survive, that do manage to have their limbs, you are going to

have resistance for future generations, and no one can be surprised by that. No one could be surprised that when a child sees their entire family taken out and their livelihood jeopardize at every moment that they're going to sit idly by when they become old enough to do something you know but as far as the closing scene i i think that also it goes to your quote brett that you talked about how um about symbolism and um metaphor and how you know with the image you could take many things from that image and with that final scene um it could be what the viewer hopes the turn the outcome is for ivan that maybe he goes to heaven and and he gets to be, or whatever, you know, rendition of something like that, like an afterlife or whatever, that he gets to be reunited with, with those memories and those peoples and whatnot, or it could be what, like, the soldiers would want for Ivan, or it could be maybe even flashback, you know, to even before he was dead, not to, not to override exactly like the importance that the children of the world are ours and what you.

you are speaking of. They are ours, every single one of them. Yeah, no, that's, that was beautifully said, Brad. I don't, I won't pretend to top, or not top, but to, I don't have much to add there except, you know, as someone, you know, with children too and wanting to protect them and the same way you want to protect the innocence of, or the same way that the, you know, the soldiers wanted to protect the innocence of Ivan, you want a better world for your children and all children, so they don't have to one day realize the, you know, the,

the horrors that we unfortunately have to see on a daily basis on, you know, on social media, not on the news, because they would not like us to see those horrors. But I don't think I had any, I don't have unless they're, unless they're Russians or something. Yes, yeah, that's true. Unless it fits a narrow, I'm going to say a NATO narrative. That's not what I even meant. That was just a Freudian slip, a narrative for NATO, I suppose. So I don't know if either you have any last thoughts on it.

If not, I guess we can call it. And I know, at least from your perspective, Brett, I think people know where to find you. But if you want to remind everyone your shows and what you're, you know, if you have anything in particular, you're going to be working on or anything like that you wanted to share. Yeah, first of all, thank you so much for having me on. I really love this series. Maybe we can keep it going. This is our third film. So if you're just listening to this, go back, you know, both of our podcast left of the projector or Rev Left Radio.

and you'll find our other two episodes on Stalker and Solaris. Highly encourage people who are just interested in film or interested in history to check out the films of Tarkovsky. I mean, you know, one of the greatest to ever do it. So highly recommend people check that out. And then as for me and my work, I have two sort of fronts that I operate on. One is the political front, and you can find everything I do there at Revolutionary Left Radio.com.

That's my main podcast, RevLeft Radio, and the sister podcast, Red Menace. I do with my co-host and friend Allison. And then I recently, in the last year or so, have started a totally separate podcast called Shulis in South Dakota, where me and my childhood friend, who is an active recovery from alcoholism, we joke around, but we also talk deeply about mental health issues, addiction, recovery, relapse, and all spirituality, all of the things in that whole realm of human experience. So it's not very political, but it does cover that other aspect of human life. So if you're kind of interested in that, you can check out shoeless and South Dakota.com. Awesome. And I guess Amanda, for you, I can post your link to your social media content as well as your, you also have shirts as well. I guess not only shirt.

Yeah, I make communist propaganda on Etsy. Nice. Yes, yes. But yeah, Amanda and Brett, as always, it's a pleasure to have you on to talk more Tarkovsky. You know, these have been, it's been a whole lot of fun to get into movies that like these, I think for anyone out there who, you know, maybe isn't used to watching, you know, these kind of things. I think Brett, you mentioned, and maybe the first one we did on Solaris is, you know, when you

watch a movie like this, it would benefit you greatly to just stick your phone in the other room. I know it's hard and we're used to having your phone when you're doing things. But I think you get a lot out of these kinds of films when you just kind of focus on things and you see the nature and the trees and everything that Tarkovsky brings to it. And, you know, not just, you know, his films. There's lots of other Soviet movies and other eras, too. And just for anyone out there, this is not coming for a couple months,

but I'll be doing an episode with the actual, actually existing socialism on East German Soviet or East German cinema in a few months. So anyone out there would recommend watching those kind of movies, too. There's lots out there. if you have access to your library, you should connect it to Canopy if they have access and you likely will find lots of great foreign films available to you, or you could just go on YouTube. But Brett, Amanda, thanks again for being on the show. It's been a pleasure. Yeah, thank you. And also long live, the resistance. Yes. And you can follow this podcast on the internets and all the same places as Brett's content

and the Etsy store. So we will catch you next time.