The Mark Chagall’s theater
Colour, 274 meters long
Screenwriter
MAYA TUROVSKAYA
Cameraman
DMITRY MASURENKOV
Producer
MIRA TODOROVSKAYA
Production
“MYRABEL” Studio
This film is a story of creation, disappearance and happy finding of the famous painter Mark Chagall’s seven theatrical pictures (1887-1985).
…November of 1920. The Jewish Chamber Theater is setting re ads to be open in Moscow. It will place in a 3-floor tenement to use on the Great Chernyshevsky side street (this house has been maintained as well as a sitting room where the auditorium was). Invited by A.Efros, Mark Chagall within 40 days not only created the scenery and costumes for
three Sholom Aleichem’s miniatures, which the theater was opened with, but also painted down all the walls and ceiling of the auditorium. This small theatrical auditorium of 90 seats has obtained the name "Channel’s Box”.
The Jewish Theater was closed in a year after assassination of its supervisor, brilliant S. Mikhoels (1948)/ Chagall’s pictures were handed over to the Bakhrushin Museum. But soon there was a fire there. All the scenery, mock-ups and costume of the Jewish Theater were lost. It war assumed that Chagall’s pictures suffered the same fate. But fortunately, thanks to painter A.Tyshler who literally on his own shoulder moved the pictures to the Tretiyakov Picture Gallery storerooms, these unique works were not damaged. They were lying there in obscurity until 1973 when Chagall came to Moscow.
Today the famous Mark Channel’s pictures are exhibited in Paris but before it there were seen by art-lovers in Moscow
and St.Petersburg, New York and Frankfurt am Main, Helsinki and Jerusalem, Milan and Florence.
