EDVARD MUNCH Movie Review

I've never been completely sure why this extraordinary film casts the spell that it does, yet its eerie, documentary-like quality does seem to constantly be on the brink of capturing some cataclysmic, violent eruption, which, of course, perfectly mirrors the temperament of the tortured artist who is its subject. British director Peter Watkins made a number of acclaimed films prior to Edvard Munch. The best of them—Culloden and The War Game—were portraits of wars past and future and were filmed in the style of documentaries (his style was so convincing that The War Game, his fictional, 47-minute what-if portrait of nuclear disaster in a British town, won the 1966 Oscar for Best Documentary Feature). His nearly three-hour, Norwegian production Edvard Munch sticks pretty much to the early years of the life of this seminal, 19th-century giant of the Expressionist movement. It does what biographies of this sort should never do—analyze the works in relation to specific portions of the artist's life—yet Watkins's film is so assured and convincing that it packs an irresistible psychological punch. This is an eye-opening, groundbreaking biography, and an entertaining one to boot.

NEXT STOP … The War Game, Van Gogh, La Belle Noiseuse

1974 167m/C NO Geir Westby, Gro Fraas, Eli Ryg; D: Peter Watkins; W: Peter Watkins; C: Odd Geir Saether. VHS FCT, NYF