A Masterpiece!

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Munch has long been one of my favorite painters, if not my favorite, since I was seventeen years old. I love films (Angelopoulos, Tarkovsky, Fellini, Antonioni, Bergman, you name it.). Therefore, it was not a hard decision for me to forgo a particularly beautiful afternoon in the outdoors for being locked up for three hours in the AC atmosphere of a movie theater. What a mistake, and what a disappointment! Where was the editor (sorry, it was Watkins) for this film? I am amazed that director/editor Peter Watkins should so obviously confuse the television medium for cinema. The film is about one hour too long. It is repetitive, grossly uneven in its presentation of the painter's life (half-life, would be a more appropriate term). It seems that Watkins went on and on, repeating himself, and suddenly, looking at his watch, realized he had to rush through the remainder of Munch's life to finish the film. He rushed and still did not make it past 1909. Why ignore Munch, the man and his work, after 1909? But I guess this is the director's prerogative, to show what he wants of Munch's life.In general, the cinematography is good, with delicate colors. The representation of the period was well researched and comes across as authentic. The hand-held camera works well most of the time, with beautiful close-ups. In some scenes, such as the socio-political discussions in the cafes, its unsteadiness underlines the chaos of the expounded philosophy. There are even moments of greatness, such as when Munch is painting "Death in the Sickroom." Unfortunately, more often than not, the camera is shaky for no apparent reason. But there are far too many cuts, so many it makes one dizzy at times just watching, and they interfere with the narrative thread of the story. Worse, the contrivance of the cuts is astonishingly predictable -- after a while, I knew that the instant any character's eyes looked directly into the camera, the scene was going to quickly cut to something else. Geir Westby's performance, whose likeness to Munch is remarkable, is not convincing: one does not get any insight regarding Munch's internal demons, or any real sense of the artist's passion, jealousy, and repression. The dreadful environment, familial, social and political, seems practically divorced from Munch's life, as the artist appears to stand apart from it all, an outside observer. His very critical relationship with his father is hardly touched upon, except for a (too often) repeated short scene at the dining table, when Munch was still young. Munch's complex and ambiguous feelings about women in general, which shaped so much of his work, are not even touched upon, except for his particular relationship with Mrs. Heiberg (Gro Fraas). Waltkins' decision to present Munch's biography more like a docu-drama could have been rewarding, except for the fact that he was not able to integrate the historical document with the subject matter.It all boils down to the editing, which is just AWFUL. Believe me, I say this not because the film is three-hours long (Angelopoulos' and Tarkovsky's films do not exactly produce short subjects), but because when a director has nothing new to say, and keeps repeating himself, it quickly becomes tedious and boring. Most likely, the original television production was shown in three one-hour installments. Therefore, many of the numerous flashbacks were justified, not only to somehow refresh the memories of the viewers who might have seen one or two previous episodes in the preceding weeks, but also to "bring aboard" new viewers. But in the continuum of the film, these same flashbacks become useless, even counter-productive, unnecessarily weighing down the viewer with back-story.Please note that I did not follow many of my fellow spectators who left the theatre early. I suffered through to the ending credits.

I just watched this movie last night and I came to this site to see how many awards this movie won. I was shocked when I saw that this was a TV movie that has apparently won no awards whatsoever! The movie is absolutely brilliant and completely mesmerizing.Rather than just detailing the chronology of the artist's life, the film tells Munch's story by juxtaposing his excruciating emotional, sexual, and spiritual conflicts against his quiet and composed public facade. Raised in a Puritan middle-class Norwegian family, Munch rebelled early on by joining a group of Bohemian artists that met nightly to discuss the strict but hypocritical rules of Norwegian society which prized marriage and purity on the one hand while allowing legalized prostitution (supervised by the local police department) on the other. Munch's mother died when he was very young and before dying, made him and his sister promise to always be good, follow Jesus, and turn away from earthly desires. The movie tries to show how his early experiences caused a lifelong tension between sexual desire, unfulfilled love, emotional trauma, and spiritual guilt that created extreme anxiety and depression that, in turn, becomes a part of Munch's art. He tries to either excise or describe his pain through his art, I'm not sure which.The movie layers multiple sounds and sights to create the story. So, for example, when Munch has his first sexual encounter with the love of his life, who is a married woman, the scene shifts back and forth between images of him kissing his love on the neck and mouth and scenes of his mother coughing up blood and being supported by her sisters as she dies. In many scenes of the movie, when he is painting, you hear a piano playing in a bar with all the bar noises and overlaying that sound is the sound of Munch weeping after he lost his love, all the while showing him attacking the canvas violently as he paints.As others have said, the painful story of Munch's life and art is also interlaced with information about the society he lived in and stories from the news. So throughout the movie, you hear news snippets like when Hitler was born or when a revolution breaks out in Venezuela or a story about a riot in London. There are interviews with factory workers who work 16 hour days or prostitutes who are trying to support their families. There are a lot of details about the sexual revolution of the Bohemians and the painful affairs that resulted from that. There are quite a few bar discussions about Marxism, women's rights, censorship, and art. You just can't imagine people having these kinds of discussions today. One of Munch's mentors was jailed after he wrote a book that was considered too provocative for proper society. Munch also had exhibitions shut down because they were considered improper and immoral.I strongly recommend this movie. I'm wondering if I'll ever see anything like this again.

The color and composition of the film -- with its grays, asymmetries, elongated figures -- seem to be modeled on Picasso's blue period rather than on Edward Munch's own work. But Picasso goes oddly unmentioned, perhaps because an allusion to Picasso might somehow qualify Munch's own artistic radicalism. This investigation of the painter as creative genius who destroys himself with drink and tobacco in an urban garret deploys all the familiar stereotypes about originality, over and over again. The director presents Munch as haunted by the image of the death by consumption of his sister and by his only partially fulfilled sexual desires. The film is beautifully self-indulgent and rather too long.

The first half of this (extemely lengthy) film intelligently brings out the social context that Munch produced his work. Typically Watkins uses the story of Munch for political ends, to criticise the hypocrisy and decadence of the Norwegan bourgeoisie. The second half of the film focuses more on Munch's complicated love-life and unhappy relationship with his father. The second half of the film becomes hypnotic as Watkins disrupts the narrative flow with flashbacks of Munch's sickly childhood and death of close family members.Despite the low-budget, the documentary style vividly brings to life in 19th C. Europe. Pseudo-documentary style is currently more commonplace, but Watkin's technique is still strikingly original and cuttingly ironic.