Acceso usuarios
Marion Poirson Dechonne
These two movies present situations which lead from some conflict (in the family’s bosom or during the war) to death. In The return (Zviaguintsev, 2004), the violent and terrifying father is killed by his sons. In Ivan’s Childhood (Tarkovski 1961) the young orphan is executed by German soldiers. The violence infers diverse problems and particularly the question of the parricide. Freud, in Totem and Taboo, analysed this question and showed the consequences of the original parricide for the primitive horde. We find its tracks in The return but the representation is too complex to adhere totally to the motive. The movie also wonders about the imposture, motive which can be linked to the question of power in Russia. But the Oedipal problem also sends back to the question of the images and their function. Finally, the death of the child or the parricide sends back, in a direct or inverted way, to a fundamental cultural text of the Russian history: the sacrified tsarevitch. In Ivan’s Childhood, the sacrifice becomes that of the soldier for the Mother Country.
