Romance on the Front: Ivan's Childhood
What is perhaps most striking about the representation of military women in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood is it fixation on romance and complete failure to address other aspects of military life. The character of Masha, the military nurse, plays a strictly secondary part in the main action of the film, and is the only woman to be given dialogue of any significance (the other two female characters in the film are Ivan’s mother and sister—both killed before the action takes place). She is purely representative of a romantic fantasy of the war, one that ignores the other realities that existed for women who were participants on the battlefront. Masha’s personal motivations for enlisting are never questioned or examined, unlike Ivan, for whom his life before the war is of the utmost narrative importance; she exists in a world absent of any relationships with other women, and her relationships with the men in her unit only are discussed in their potential for romance. This hierarchy of gender-based representation is clearly played out in the following scene, in which Captain Kholin gets her alone in a birch wood forest and makes a series of increasingly aggressive advances.
There is a degree of dissonance that occurs in this scene from the rest of the film—an uncanny sense of tranquility pervades in the silence of the forest, and in the pair’s hushed tones. It is only as Kholin seizes Masha and kisses her that the sounds of distant gunfire unsettle the scene, and even this disruption fails to deter him. The ultimate message is that romance, and specifically women in the realm of romance, are fundamentally separate from and incompatible with the action of war. Ivan’s Childhood presents an impossibly uncomplicated relationship between men and women in his portrayal of Kholin’s pursuit of Masha, in which women’s “relationships with men were envisioned as stable, predictable and essentially private” (Kirschenbaum, “Our Cities, Our Hearths, Our Families” p. 834). What was so appealing about this ‘stable and predictable’ dynamic to Soviet audiences in 1962? Perhaps it is that a more complex depiction of women, ones who were snipers or pilots and shown in scenes of active combat were dissonant with postwar values attributed to women, who, as has been noted before, found their new social roles centered on domesticity and the family.