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icicles and "prop" details of the Russian winter, which cannot be copied faithfully. What we took was the most important aspect of winter— its proportions of light and sound, the whiteness of the ground and the darkness of the sky. We took the winter formula, so we had no need to lie, for the formula corresponded to the truth. We did one more thing: bearing in mind the purpose of the film, we played up the battle, not winter. What we showed was a battle, not the season. Winter was there in a degree making distinction from real winter impossible. In that degree, in that formula of winter relations and in the tact that prompted us "not to show winter" lies the explanation •of our success. The considerations which made us "create" winter determined the only correct way of achieving this.
And finally — the time in which we made the film. The time was reduced first by shifting winter to summer and then by thrice advancing our own schedule. This was due to the enthusiasm which the theme aroused in our crew. Curiously enough, unlike my colleagues, Alexander Nevsky was my first sound film.
I would have liked very much to experiment at leisure, to try some of the ideas that had haunted me during the years I watched sound films from a distance. But the guns booming at Lake Khasan shattered my intentions. There was no time for day-dreaming. Biting our clenched fists in exasperation that the film was not ready and that we could not hurl it, like a grenade, into the face of the aggressor, we grimly braced ourselves up, and the impossible date of comple1;ion — November 7 — began taking shape in our minds as something real. I must own that the thought uppermost in my mind to the last day was: "The film cannot be ready by November 7, but ready it must be." I was prepared to face any sacrifice to achieve it: I was willing to give up all that fascinated me in the principles of audio-visual •combinations, for it seemed impossible to ensure an organic unity of music and picture in the short time allotted us. It seemed impossible to find and reproduce that wonderful inner synchronization of plastic and musical images, that is, achieve that in which actually lies the secret of audio-visual impression. All this requires time, thinking, cutting and recutting, not once, but many times. Would the image suggest the music? How, or rather when, should I be able to fuse these two elements into one whole?
This is where the magician Sergei Prokofiev came to my rescue.
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