The Classics

Peter Watkins’

EDVARD MUNCH

Monday–Tuesday, August 22–23 at 7:15pm

Unavailable for many years in the United States, Peter Watkins’ film about the great 20th century Norwegian artist Edvard Munch has long been a holy grail of American devotees of film and painting. The restoration of this film, considered by many to be the greatest film ever made about an artist, is one of the major cinematic events of 2005. Watkins’ film is a departure from most film biographies. Using a collage-like technique mixing fact and fiction, a journalistic “you-are-there” approach, straight drama, and beautiful color photography suggestive of the artist’s work, Watkins has been able, in the words of Vincent Canby in the New York Times, to “suggest the multiplicity of psychological and social factors at work on the man, using a narrative that is simultaneously as journalistic and as freely associative as a dream.” Watkins accepts that the moment of creation is an intimate, slightly mysterious thing that is impossible to explain; instead he gives us a powerful, moving portrait of a person who, despite emotional sufferings and disparagement, persisted in a life of art.

The film covers roughly half of Munch’s life, from his painful childhood (both mother and sister died of tuberculosis), which he characterized as being “hovered over by dark angels of illness, insanity, and death,” through his middle years as he struggled against the ignorance and suffocating conventions of his time. The film focuses on a crucial time of trauma, hardship, and artistic ferment for Munch, who lived to 80 years old (dying in 1944) and towards the end of his life received his justly deserved recognition. Munch represented a vanguard in modern painting and graphic arts: his work represents a switch from exteriors (the Impressionist experiments in light and atmosphere) to an attempt to portray the interior; his work is a cathartic working out of his deepest feelings of pain, loss, jealousy, and sexuality. It’s easy to see why Munch became the progenitor of the movement in art known as Expressionism. Landscapes became of no interest to him unless, like Van Gogh, it expressed emotions; for Munch, the true object of his art, and his search for a new style of art, was centered on human feelings.

Recently described by the Harvard Film Archives as “the most neglected major filmmaker at work today,” Academy Award winner Peter Watkins has created an amazing body of work that includes The War Game, The Battle of Culloden, Privilege, and La Commune. Watkins described Edvard Munch as “most personal film I have ever made.”

(Norway, 1976, 174 min., color • Director/writer: Peter Watkins • Cast: Geir Westby, Gro Fraas)