Edward Munch (1974)

Clearly, Edward Munch (dir. P. Watkins) aspires to be as artful as the painting's of the artist in the title. I am torn between regarding some of the segments of the film as preposterously pretentious and appreciating the film's sense for rhytm and adventurous stylistic jumps. One at least has to admit that this is not your common biopic trodding along the familiar path of an artist's life with predictable emotional peaks. Interestingly, the film has a a mostly Norwegian cast but the narrator is English. The life of Munch is contextualized by means of a dry voice enumerating historical events during the relevant years. Sometimes this technique works, at other times not at all (I am still not at all clear about what the director aims at here, what kind of contextualization). I was not familiar with the ouevre of Peter Watkins before watching the film, but now I would surely like to see his othe films (about the Paris commune for example, or The War Game). At least, Edward Munch fights against conventional cinema - it tries to rely on the cinematic form to create a new style of film, a new way of assembling material. Does it succeed? Sometimes. Some of the films convey how different forms of art intersect: it is fascinating to watch Munch scrape away at the canvas, you even hear a very detailed world of sounds in Munch's work on his paintings. - The film manages to capture the texture of the paintings in a way that was both thrilling and interesting. The lopside of the film is predictable enough: emotional artist who gains recognition late in life, but who stoically bears the spite of the reviewers and the audience. And: sexual frustration, always sexual frustration in the artist's life that is then of course transported right onto the canvas (one image: a girl's body from the point of view of the male gaze in coitus, yesyes).