Educational Media Reviews Online

The intriguing title of this documentary film on the life of Marc Chagall, To Russia, Asses and Others, is borrowed from one of the artist’s early masterworks. Painted in 1912 shortly after Chagall’s arrival in Paris from his native Russia, the canvas of the same name is filled with magical symbols—Interwoven references to his village childhood, folk tales, religious life—played out in exuberant color and expressive movement. The painting typifies, even at this early stage in Chagall’s career, the unique vision that would characterize his work throughout a long and eventful life. The film, like the painting, is rich with the artist’s creative energy, imagery and narrative—drawn in part from his illustrated memoir, My Life, a poetic self-portrait of his early years in Russia.

One of the most original and influential artists of the twentieth century, Marc Chagall was born in 1887 in one of the last Jewish communities in czarist Russia, the town of Vitebsk in what is now Belarus. He studied art locally from an early age, and then moved to St. Petersburg where he worked with artist Leon Bakst who noted that Chagall listened to his lessons and then did “something entirely different.” Traveling to Paris in 1911 Chagall settled in an avant-garde enclave in Montparnasse that included Modigliani, Soutine, Delaunay, Leger and Apollinaire, among others. Chagall said of this period that “gorging myself on the exhibitions of Paris” was the education no atelier could have offered him. Influenced by Impressionists, Fauvists, Cubists and Surrealists, but not a part of any formal movement, he refined his own very personal and imaginative style. He became a French citizen in 1937 only to flee the Nazis in 1941, joining Braque, Dali, Calder, Tanguy, Duchamp, Mondrian and other artists in exile in the United States; he returned to France in 1948. In his later years, while continuing to paint prolifically, he also worked in ceramics, stained glass, mosaic and sculpture, completing a number of large-scale public commissions worldwide. In 1973 the first museum in France dedicated to a living artist, the National Museum of the Biblical Message of Marc Chagall, opened in Nice. At the age of 90 he became the first living artist to be honored with an exhibition at the Louvre. He died in France in 1985 at age 97.

Alive with the artist’s evocative voice and images together with archival stills and clips of interviews, public appearances and private moments, To Russia, Asses and Others is—as Chagall once described the process of painting—“a window through which I could take flight towards another world.” This window on Chagall’s extraordinary world is very highly recommended for libraries with collections in art, art history and related subjects.