Review of Edvard Munch (1974) by Anne F — 22 Jul 2011

Took me two days to watch this even though it wasn't painful to get through or anything. It' hasn't to be one of the most fascinating and inspiring movies about art I've ever seen. It's easy to just jump in and describe the formalistic decisions Watkins made, and the achievement of actually pulling it off.

But it'd feel more appropriate if I tried to articulate the emotional reaction it got out of me. The moods it evoked. The tone of thoughts it stirred inside me upon witnessing the psychological anguish and subsequent creativity it inspired in Munch.

There's a strange universality to the dreamlike web of Munch's life story. Like Sombre, he's haunted by this impossible desire to possess the women he loves. "The desire to possess her is a wound." It causes a paranoia. An icy fear that fuels his nightmarish and increasingly abstract works of art. The public, predictably, rejects the manifestations of these feelings. Labeling them as works of the unstable, the consensus dismisses them, horrified.

These aren't my feelings. This is the emotional backdrop of his story. But if they convey feeling, perhaps that is what I meant to do. Because I, too, have often felt this angry artistic inspiration. This terrible desire to see deeply into the darkness and truth of oneself, and express it in hopes of redeeming these feelings. In hopes of supplying oneself with meaning. I've always known this can never happen. But what else can one do with these feelings? No, they must be expressed.

Munch turned these obsessive and frightening feelings into master works of paint and wood carvings. But he never got over these feelings. This emotional state was his identity. It's also what made him this rare type of individual. He always felt opposed to the world. Unable to make complete sense of it. He felt opposed to women, because he perhaps thought they sought to weaken him. He felt opposed to other men because of jealousy, which he described as, not the fear of loss, but the fear of division.

He sought to escape from the isolation of the world through emotional and physical love, and he never did. It's incredible how close I feel to his character, despite his existing an entire century before my time. It has a lot to do with this breathtaking, original narrative style Watkins serves us, which plays like Nicolas Roeg meets Terrence Malick. Memories appear unexplained, interwoven with the present tense. And there's a lingering voice of narrative/historical wisdom, as if in a documentary, giving us this overarching encyclopediac sense of time. And characters talk to us, right to us, about their political/artistic beliefs, completely convincing us that somehow this film was created in the 1880/90s. And we're right there, as close as you can get, when the moment of inspiration hits Munch. As he scrapes away all of the unimportant details of his canvas. As he tends to the obscurities of his deep, dark abyss.

The most unforgettable formalistic technique by Watkins is to have his characters look directly into the camera in the middile of scenes, or during important moments of crisis, as if in one of Munch's own paintings. We get this strong sensation of connection with them. They confide in us, despite their intimacies. Despite their melancholia in their present moments, they look to US. Impossible. Such is the magic of this movie.