Edvard Munch

Director: Peter Watkins

1974 / 210min / 35mm

The personal and political are the warp and weft of Watkins’s sui generis epic—a work, concerned primarily with Munch’s movements between 1884 and 1895, which intimately explores the deep well of pain from which the greatest of Norwegian painters drew, and locates its subject within a larger social context, the wallflower artist periodically stepping into the background while such matters as ubiquitous child labor and other rampant injustices in late 19th-century industrialized Europe come to the fore. While Watkins’s dependence on such fourth-wall-breaking techniques as direct address “interviews” dispense with any pretext of naturalism, watching Edvard Munch offers an immersion in its subject’s era and milieu that the vast run of fustily overwrought period pieces could never manage.

Distributor: Peter Watkins

35mm collection print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive.

Part of The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters