Edvard Munch

Of all the films I have discovered in the last couple of decades, this extremely complex, innovative and multi-dimensional masterpiece is the one that, more than any other, I would wish, with the benefit of hindsight, to have had the opportunity of seeing before embarking on my own little cinematic adventure. Perhaps more than any other film, it allows the viewer to gain an informed understanding of its protagonist and his milieu, and the filmmaker’s methods are both highly radical and eminently watchable, making this one of the most successful cinematic experiments of all time, as well as one of the most political. Watched the 221-minute version: it is perhaps a shame that the Blu-ray does not include both versions, but absolutely wonderful that it exists at all.

Not everyone agrees, of course. For an alternative view, cf., Shipman (1986), p. 267:

“A superficially impressive biography of the Norwegian painter, played by Geir Wetsby, who at least looks like him. It starts well, with a portrait of the élite of Christiana (Oslo), both its bohemians and bourgeoisie, who were the source of Munch’s art; but the writer-director insists on fitting Munch’s life into his own preconceived (i.e. conventional) notions – romantic frustration, domestic distrust, flouting of opening, critical ostracism.“

For additional context, which also explains a great deal about why I was unaware of this film’s existence for so long, and greatly complicates Shipman’s absurdly dismissive judgment about the “preconceived” and “conventional” presentation of the artist, let us quote at length from de Baecque (2012):

““This guy is a genius”, said Ingmar Bergman of the English filmmaker Peter Watkins, in January 1974, as he was coming out of a screening of Edvard Munch in Stockholm. […] A subtle admixture, the film is entirely dedicated to the delirious recording of the dynamic of individual creation, reinserting it in its rich and contradictory context, at once social, intellectual, sentimental, and familial. The Watkins system can be defined as a way of reconstructing history so as to film it, thus bringing together in a single shot all moments in time: the film is set in the past, and meticulously places itself in history, but also in the present, since the events have the appearance of being recorded (and also often commentated) live, and conveys a certain sense of futurity as well, since it is rife with anachronisms, such as speaking directly to camera, in 1880.“ (p. 150.)

“Norwegian television was wary: Watkins was British, and his reputation as a highly political individual did not inspire confidence, while Munch had become the Norwegian national painter. It took three years of negotiations between Swedish and Norwegian television to reach an agreement on the project. Meanwhile, the filmmaker moved to Oslo with his family, at the end of 1972, in order to conduct archival research on Munch and to prepare for the shooting. Edvard Munch was shot during almost the entire year of 1973, in Oslo and in a small Norwegian town called Christiansen, where the painter was from. “If Peter Watkins’ Edvard Munch was an art history article, it would be considered quite lame”, the critic Philippe Azoury has rightly commented. In light of more recent aesthetic approaches, Watkins’ obsession with elucidating the mysteries of the work and explaining the power of the art by the man – Munch, both the suffering subject and passenger in time, a pure product of a century that he did not transcend but rather espoused – undoubtedly appears more dated than the film, shot in 1973 and briefly released at the end of 1976. But the film succeeds, thanks to the Watkins touch, at making palpable, sensual, and physical a young rebel of the 1880s, a painter who promoted free love and provoked society. “What struck me most”, Watkins admitted, “is his incredibly direct way of looking at the world, as the characters in his paintings often do. I tried to recapture this frontal gaze at the spectator, which was a constant in my film. I have never seen another artist do the same thing with the same intensity.”“ (p. 190.)

“Watkins drew support from the findings of a young art historian who shed new light on the painter’s life, revealing the existence of his first mistress, Mrs. Heiberg, and of the notebooks he kept, written as intimate fragments. These fragments offered up characters, facts, and phrases that had become historically irrefutable – even for Norwegian television – and that punctuate the film throughout. The film thus places Munch in a context of intense social violence, constantly stirring up in its discourse – in voice-over, a technique Watkins relished – class struggle and the rivalries and tensions that existed in the artist’s milieu and in his life. Munch was an antibourgeois militant who lived in a bohemian world, whose atmosphere was as feverish as it was sensuous, as political as it was macabre. “He did not differentiate between all these levels; he lived his life to the fullest”, said the filmmaker.“ (pp. 190 92.)

“Slowly but surely, the true subject of the film, however invisible, emerges: the intimate whispers of the wind of modernity blowing across all Europe.
“But Norwegian and Swedish television considered this magnum opus to be “out of control”, and thus a failure, declaring in particular that it did not work because the language spoken by Munch was not the Norwegian of the period. Their rejection also betrayed their reluctance to step outside of the already standardized format of television productions. Nordic television networks thus refused to broadcast the film in 35-mm format and blocked its screening at the Cannes Film Festival, even though it had been selected, and confined it to “B program” broadcasts on local networks. It was released in theaters for a few weeks only, in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and France. “Then the curtain fell on this film”, as the filmmaker bitterly lamented. “The Scandinavian television networks buried it. It was not the right Munch.” Only very recently did the team’s technicians find the 16-mm prints, which had been thought lost, in an American lab. They were thus able to print new copies for a new French release in February 2005 that sounded the film’s – as well as its director’s – rehabilitation.“ (p. 192.)

Finally, in April 2024, Lars von Trier wrote, when he curated an art exhibition:

“Let us, as a courtesy, refer to the curator in what follows as Trier. The forces that drew the young Trier to the Thiel Gallery were, of course, triggered by earlier events, among which it is essential to mention the British director Peter Watkins and his, on Trier, utterly overwhelming impact by way of his television film Edvard Munch (1974). The film – which would later influence that self-same Trier precisely as ‘film’, but which at first affected him through its subject matter: Edvard Munch’s life and art – was the snowball that, quite explosively (if one can say such a thing about snowballs), sent Trier straight to the local paint shop (where, among other things, he became acquainted with the intricacies of stretcher frames and other technicalities of traditional work in the visual arts).“