Using Soviet stock material that could well have been shot following the formal precepts of this director due to the similarity in its register with the one used by Loznitsa in his films (wide fixed and panoramic shots, as few tracking and panning shots as possible, used only when the register situation requires it), with a punctilious work in the elaboration of the music score that resignifies the visible order and is just as intelligent as the editing, Loznitsa rekindles the experience of the German siege of Leningrad during the first half of the 40s: it would be impossible to film the whole 900 days of the event, but in less than an hour we witness the bombings, the debris collecting, the efforts to survive in a furious winter, the parade and execution of prisoners, the ominous fate of the dead, sometimes simply laying on the street, defeated by the elements and the harshness of weather… Blockade is an excellent example of the substantial interaction between cinematographic image and History, a technical and interpretative solidarity that constitutes the big novelty of the 20th Century, because a new device for capturing reality allowed, since then and for the first time, to capture historical experience in a visual kind of storage independent to the collective memory of those who lived it, or to the documents written to keep it. The unthinkable alacrity of the people gathered in public spaces to see the explosions of fireworks closes this monumental document of a past that seems remote but that still is the shadow of an unfinished project of (European) Modernity.