Edvard Munch

I just watched this movie last night and I came to this site to see how many awards this movie won. I was shocked when I saw that this was a TV movie that has apparently won no awards whatsoever! The movie is absolutely brilliant and completely mesmerizing.

Rather than just detailing the chronology of the artist's life, the film tells Munch's story by juxtaposing his excruciating emotional, sexual, and spiritual conflicts against his quiet and composed public facade. Raised in a Puritan middle-class Norwegian family, Munch rebelled early on by joining a group of Bohemian artists that met nightly to discuss the strict but hypocritical rules of Norwegian society which prized marriage and purity on the one hand while allowing legalized prostitution (supervised by the local police department) on the other. Munch's mother died when he was very young and before dying, made him and his sister promise to always be good, follow Jesus, and turn away from earthly desires. The movie tries to show how his early experiences caused a lifelong tension between sexual desire, unfulfilled love, emotional trauma, and spiritual guilt that created extreme anxiety and depression that, in turn, becomes a part of Munch's art. He tries to either excise or describe his pain through his art, I'm not sure which.

The movie layers multiple sounds and sights to create the story. So, for example, when Munch has his first sexual encounter with the love of his life, who is a married woman, the scene shifts back and forth between images of him kissing his love on the neck and mouth and scenes of his mother coughing up blood and being supported by her sisters as she dies. In many scenes of the movie, when he is painting, you hear a piano playing in a bar with all the bar noises and overlaying that sound is the sound of Munch weeping after he lost his love, all the while showing him attacking the canvas violently as he paints.

As others have said, the painful story of Munch's life and art is also interlaced with information about the society he lived in and stories from the news. So throughout the movie, you hear news snippets like when Hitler was born or when a revolution breaks out in Venezuela or a story about a riot in London. There are interviews with factory workers who work 16 hour days or prostitutes who are trying to support their families. There are a lot of details about the sexual revolution of the Bohemians and the painful affairs that resulted from that. There are quite a few bar discussions about Marxism, women's rights, censorship, and art. You just can't imagine people having these kinds of discussions today. One of Munch's mentors was jailed after he wrote a book that was considered too provocative for proper society. Munch also had exhibitions shut down because they were considered improper and immoral.

I strongly recommend this movie. I'm wondering if I'll ever see anything like this again.

At 221 minutes, this film pushes to the outer limits of its material and cinematic technique. Certainly the director's style is fresh and arresting, and the performances (if that's the right word for a 'fly-on-the-wall' directorial style), including the remarkable look-alike actor who plays Munch, are uniformly excellent. The art direction is also particularly impressive, evoking both late 19th century middle class and bohemian Europe with real pungency. The film concentrates on some of the main formative influences on Munch's art: his family relations, circle of friends and lovers. Munch's poor health as a child (you would never guess from this film that he actually lived to the age of 80) is given much prominence. The film, however, could not be described as a biography of the artist. It has nothing to say about his commercial success (which was not insignificant by 1897), what paintings he sold, how he supported himself, or anything about the second half of his life. For me, the last 30 minutes of the film seemed repetitive and, with the accumulation of repeated images and scenes, suffered from the law of diminishing returns. Perhaps the film's greatest strength is its exposition of the circumstances under which several key works in Munch's oeuvre were created. The depictions of the act of painting – often the weakest element in such biopics – are brilliantly handled by Watkins. Worth seeing. But worth owning?

Peter Watkins' Edvard Munch contains artistic innovations in editing and story that surely would have changed the face of how films are made--if only more people had seen it. Through an inspired stream-of-consciousness editing style, Watkins approximates the workings of the mind with greater success than ever before seen on screen. Because of this achievement, Watkins is able to convey, with vivid strokes, the intensity of Munch's emotions, and how they led to his tortured art. It is tragic that this film has not seen larger distribution, just as it is tragic that Watkins' other films are cloistered by the very companies that produce them. But then again, I cannot imagine going to the cineplex and watching a statement of life through art as soaring and original as Edvard Munch. For now, I'll continue to treasure it alone.

This is one of the most moving, experimental films I have ever seen. Peter Watkins' political understanding of the times and his compassion for the struggling, alienated artist is superb. He has a unique method of linking the present to the painter's traumatic past, namely the deaths of his mother and sister from tuberculosis, when he was a boy. The camerawork and close-ups of individual faces is excellent. Munch's grief, when he loses the woman he loves, leads to his best works and a premature death. No other director has made a film about the inner and outer worlds of an artist as well as this. I highly recommend the film.

Probably the most powerful biography of a painter on film with Tarkovski's "Andrei Rublev" and Pialat's "Van Gogh". The way Watkins handles the narration of his film and of Munch's life and art is simply amazing. A perfect example of life as art and art as life. The commentary is never redundant with what is seen on the screen and like the works of Munch, the shape of the movie is like a spiral, where scenes come back over and over, in a repetitive manner, like the paintings/carvings of Munch, who often drew the same subjects. It makes you want to see more of Munch's works as well as other movies by Watkins. Definitely worth being seen more than once.