Edvard Munch (1974, Peter Watkins) (Patreon)

63/100

By my reckoning, Watkins juggles at least four intricately latticed projects over the course of Edvard Munch's 221 minutes. (I watched the complete version as issued on Eureka!'s Masters of Cinema label, and am frankly unsure why the film's U.S. distributor, back in 1976, bothered trimming it to a still-epic three hours.) These projects aren't all equally effective, nor equally interesting to me personally; what's more, I don't think they inform each other as much as Watkins likely intended/believed. Held my attention, though. Let's take 'em one at a time.

• On the most fundamental level, this is, as it says on the tin, a biopic, dramatizing Munch's young adulthood and early career. Not my favorite genre, to put it mildly, though movies about celebrated painters tend to at the very least be more visually dynamic than are {shudder} movies about celebrated writers. Having known precious little about Munch going in, I learned quite a lot; while the lion's share of these biographical details come from Watkins' voiceover narration, and might just as readily have been communicated in written form, a great deal of effort goes into re-creating paintings in various stages of progress, which really does provide insight that no other medium could. Certainly not with the same impact. To cite only the most notable example: I'd never particularly thought much of The Sick Child, and now realize that it can't be properly appreciated in photographs—you need to be cognizant of how forcefully Munch scratched and scored that image into half-legibility. Of course, the movie itself consists of photographs, so there's still a remove (cue fond memories of me standing transfixed inches from Van Gogh's The Starry Night between MoMA screenings; as I've said before, if you haven't seen that canvas in person, you don't know its power), but Geir Westby's Munch manically scraping away, accompanied by discomfitingly harsh sound design more in keeping with demolition than with creation, allowed me to "see" this work as I never had before. Did I require well over three hours of such Munchiana? No...but, then, as I noted up top, that's by no means all that Watkins is up to here.

• I'm not gonna devote much attention to his lifelong penchant for trampling across the narrative/documentary border, mostly because it seems largely superfluous to me in this context. Or, no, that's not true. Characters directly addressing the camera, as if being interviewed for a doc, do create a productive cognitive dissonance, keeping Munch at a remove (by aggressively reminding us that he's a subject of study) while simultaneously lending his life a formal veneer of verisimilitude. I can get behind that. By, oh, I dunno, maybe the 50th or 60th time Westby looks straight into the lens, however, I was very very ready for him to knock that Jim Halpert shit the fuck off. A low blow, admittedly, and unfair—Watkins got there 30 years earlier, with considerably less glib intentions. But the animating impulse—"Can you believe this shit?"—is really very much the same.

• Much more compelling, and making the strongest case for Edvard Munch as a great film, is the Resnais-esque collapsing of present and past. I got antsy during the initial half hour, which positively wallows in Edvard's miserable, illness- and death-wracked childhood, and resisted when fragments of these scenes began invading the artistically fecund period of 1883–93. Nothing more irritatingly simplistic than ascribing someone's creativity to early, unprocessed emotional trauma. Rather than go home, however, Watkins goes big. The onslaught of uninflected yet harrowing imagery from many years earlier never lets up, and eventually gets supplemented by the apparently equally dismaying memory of "Mrs. Heiberg" walking right past him on the arm of another man at their appointed meeting. Crucially, Watkins almost never juxtaposes these quick-cut flashbacks with shots of Munch in thought, or with any obvious trigger; they seem less like his memories than like the film itself insisting upon their primacy, against his conscious will. I do think that the effect eventually loses some of its potency via repetition, but I also cracked up and got choked up when Munch weeping/whining over Mrs. Freiberg's unforgivable slight ("I wait and then she comes and simply walks past with a smile") shows up again deep into the movie's third hour, after he'd finally seemed to have moved on. Terrific layered sound design, too—this is one of few films I've seen (the opening of Altman's Vincent & Theo is another example) in which ambient noise from scene A bleeds into and sticks around throughout scene B, as if haunting it.

Wondering why my rating isn't significantly higher, given all this praise? I'm starting to wonder that myself, though it's mostly just the too-much-ness of it all, along with my lack of interest in the personal lives of great artists. But there's also the most intriguing/maddening of Watkins' several projects:

• In its final two minutes, following the end credits, Edvard Munch serves up one doozy of a twist: Despite having focused intently upon Munch for nearly four hours, the film isn't actually about him at all. Rather, it's been a stealth portrait of the various women in his life, each of whom receives a closing summation that's denied to every male character, including Munch himself. This late-breaking gambit fairly blindsided me, as I'd spent some time cringing at the film's apparent acceptance of August Strindberg's* misogyny—not merely letting him voice his loathsome ideas, which is historically accurate, but implicitly supporting (via Watkins' flatly expository narration) the idea that e.g. Dagny Juel served as a sexual plaything to be passed around among Berlin's intelligentsia, "gifted" from one man to another, possessing no agency of her own. Watkins does make a point of revealing her sad fate quite early, years before the movie gets there (actually I'm not sure it ever quite reaches 1901), and there are other occasions throughout the film when he privileges minor female characters for no immediately discernible reason. Still, I was wholly unprepared for that empathetic postscript, which makes me want very much to retroactively perceive the entire film as a rebuke of the Great Man Biopic, secretly allied with ostensible objects. So far, I can't pull it off, in part because Watkins is prone to digressions that clearly have no larger purpose—Edvard Munch's opening five minutes are largely devoted to bemoaning 19th-century Norway's horrific child labor laws, which as far as I can tell didn't affect the middle-class Munch family in any way. Watkins is just horrified by that fact and offers it as context, in the same way that he keeps citing notable events from each new year at which the narrative arrives. ("1889. The Eiffel Tower is built and the box camera comes into production. Vincent Van Gogh paints Landscape With Olive Trees and Wheat Field With Cypresses. And Adolf Hitler is born.") If the last two minutes aren't a culmination, they seem shallow, somehow. Were this not such a behemoth, I might be tempted to watch it again, see whether it's a radically different experience when viewed through that lens. Maybe someday.

* Strindberg is played by one Alf Kåre Strindberg, who's so magnificent in the role that I choose to assume he's the playwright's great-great-grandson, though I can't confirm any relation at all via brief googling. Could be a coincidence.