Picture’s up! Rolling! Action!

There’s a place in Moscow which has attracted me for a long time: the famous ‘Mosfilm’ film studio. It offers excursions around its museum and premises, so when I saw their advertisement, I immediately phoned and booked a place in the next group.

The first stop of the excursion was a garage with Mosfilm’s transportation vehicles. This exhibit is renewed regularly. A car on view today could be at the shooting site tomorrow.

I was most impressed with the GAZ-21 Volga car and a police motorcycle which had starred in old Soviet movies, as well as vintage soda machines from which actors took their drinks.

One of the most fascinating exhibits was an old fire truck from Leonid Gaidai’s Twelve Chairs. Take a good look – the ladder on this fire truck is made of wood! Yes, Soviet firemen in the 1920s had to climb up wooden ladders to get into a building on fire!

The exhibits include not only Soviet vehicles, but cars used in more contemporary Russian movies.

We left the garage and entered other exhibition halls where we were shown amazing film scenery backdrops.

One of them was for a film based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytales. My imagination immediately took me to the streets of old Danish towns. Models and papier-maché props turned into walls and artefacts of those old times. Everything looked exactly as it would have in the Andersen tales.

Then we saw a huge warehouse where one of the first episodes of Robert Zemeckis’ Cast Away was shot, at the point where Tom Hanks first appeared in the film.

Zemeckis and Hanks at Mosfilm

Next to that premise was Studio #5, which is called ‘lucky’ since any film which had at least one scene shot in this studio, became,   if not a blockbuster, at least warmly received by the public.

The guide told us that the room is totally soundproof so that even if Niagara starts pouring down inside, no one outside will hear a thing.

Then we proceeded to the most fascinating part of the excursion – a walk among Old Moscow scenery.

A whole street represented Moscow in WWII for Karen Shakhnazarov’s White Tiger.

Decorators and artists really grasped the authenticity; I found myself in a snow-packed hungry wartime city: broken glass, destroyed houses, empty streets, torn iron gates, yellowed leaflets and walls with bullet traces.

The next street belongs to the end of the 19^th century. The only thing it lacked was carriages, sleighs and people. Unfortunately the studio cannot invite such a crowd in for each excursion! But I’m just grumbling; everything was perfect.

The next thing I saw was completely surrealistic. Old mansions on one side, a burnt husk of a house on the other, and a 21^st-century skyscraper in-between! Stand and gaze. Epochs meet here.

People who live in the Mosfilm area don’t like this building, and neither do the studio’s designers, who have more work lined up on it. But in my eyes, it is beautiful as it is, a true demonstration of the real magic of cinematography.

Azamat Ulbashev, master’s student at the HSE School of Statistics, Data Analysis and Demography

 

Information:

Address: 1 Mosfilmovskaya Ulitsa

Phone/fax: +7 (499) 143-9599, +7 (495) 745-2890

E-mail: excursion@mosfilm.ru

Preliminary registration is required.