| Abstract |
This remarkable film retraces the life and work of the beloved artist Marc Chagall. Much of the narrative is told in his own words, drawn from his autobiography, Ma Vie (My Life) and there is unique film footage of Chagall being interviewed as he paints. An intimate picture of the mischievous painter and his peripatetic life emerges through interviews of the many personalities in the art world which Chagall inhabited : Apollinaire, Bonnard, Matisse, Picasso, Mayakovski and Malraux. Extensive use of rare historical film adds richness to this astounding biography of the man who was born in the shtetl of Vitebsk in tsarist Russia. When World War I broke out, he was forced to join the Russian Army and then asked to open an art school in Vitebsk by the Bolsheviks when they took power. He left for Paris in 1923 where he and his wife Bella lived in poverty. Finally, his illustrations for a special edition of Gogol s Dead Souls attracted wide admiration. As he put it, "I created my own reality -- neither Cubist nor Impressionist." Fleeing Paris in 1939 he spent the war years in New York, collaborating on art, theatre and ballet projects with other artists in exile, Duchamps, Calder, Tanguy, Stravinsky and Massine. Post-war, he created monumental works often inspired by the Bible: the magnificent ceiling of the Paris Opera, the murals for the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the stained glass windows for cathedrals in Metz and Reims and the Hadassah clinic in Jerusalem. In 1984 three large exhibitions in France celebrated the artist's 97th birthday, one at the National Museum Message Biblique Marc Chagall in Nice. His attempts to connect the Jewish traditions of his childhood to the artistic modernity of his time yielded a profoundly original oeuvre somewhat removed from the prevailing currents of art in the 20th century. As he said, "I chose painting because it seemed a window through which I could take flight to another world." |
