page_title: Moscow Strikes Back
section_title: Making the film
hierarchical_section_title: Moscow Strikes Back / Making the film
caption_attribution_description: English: Still from Moscow Strikes Back, Soviet documentary of the Battle of Moscow. Directed by Ilya Kopalin. 1 of 4 films to win the 1943 Academy Award for Best Documentary.
context_page_description: Moscow Strikes Back is a Soviet war documentary about the Battle of Moscow made during the battle in October 1941 – January 1942, directed by Leonid Varlamov and Ilya Kopalin. It won an Academy Award for Best Documentary.
context_section_description: The film's director Ilya Kopalin recalled of the film shoot in the winter of 1941–1942 that:
  
  It's been severe, but happy days. Severe, because we made a movie in a front-line city. Basement studio has turned into the apartment where we lived like in casern. At night, we discussed with the cameramen the job for the next day, and in the morning the machine took away the cameramen to the front to back in the evening with the footage. The shooting was very heavy. There were thirty-degree frosts. The mechanism of the movie camera froze and clogged with snow, numbed hands refused to act. There were times when in the car, which returned from the front, lay the body of our dead comrade and broken equipment. But the knowledge that the enemy pulls back from Moscow, that collapses the myth of the invincibility of the Nazi armies, gave us strength.
  We knew that the film should be created as soon as possible, that the people should as soon as possible to see on the screen the offspring of the first victories of the army. And shoted material immediately move to the lab on the editing table. We cut both day and night in the cold editing rooms without going to the shelter even when air-raid ... At the end of December 1941 cutting of the movie was over. In the great cold hall began dubbing studio. There was the most responsible exciting entry: "Fifth Symphony" by Tchaikovsky. Bright Russian melody, outcry, wailing chords. And on the screen were burned towns, gallows, corpses, and all the way of retreat of fascists revealed signs of violence and barbarism. We listened to music, watched the screen and cried. Cried the musicians, who played with difficulty by frozen hands.
caption: German soldier lies dead, snow on his back
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