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Edvard Munch
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Moods and Scratches Peter Watkins’ three-hour and 40-minute Edvard Munch, made for Scandinavian television, is one of the most fascinating – and unusual – of all artist biopics. It can be seen as a grand, unstable depository of virtually all the experiments with and enlargements of the traditional artist-biopic form. At the same time, it also retains, within its innovative format, some quite traditional, conventional elements – and the appearance of these can be a little puzzling. Edvard Munch presents itself, in the vein of Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) or Orson Welles’ F for Fake (1973), as a film of total montage. That is, every scene is grist to the mill of a vast editing mosaic that compares fragments of incidents across time, and overlays the sound of one event over the image of another (and vice versa). Watkins insistently returns to the same material (or variations of it), churning it around to the extent that the film seems only occasionally to move forward in its chronological story line. The film never settles down (as it were) to show us one scene conventionally enacted and resolved from start to finish. On top of that, Watkins deploys his signature Brechtian device: the deliberately unreal conceit of a TV crew anachronistically darting around inside the scenes (including the most intimate) of the artist’s life, gathering images in reportage mode and pushily interviewing everybody for their supposedly spontaneous impressions (the film’s credits insist that the players were often offering their own, modern-day opinion of, for instance, Munch’s art). This results in the characters casting endless looks (surprised, annoyed, weary, thoughtful) into camera, as if feeling the pressure of a live media event. Edvard Munch equates its own aura of disruptive, charged modernity with Munch’s art. On the one hand, the project embraces the Romantic code of the artist’s self-expression as completely as two prominent Van Gogh biopics, Vincente Minnelli’s underrated Lust for Life (1956) starring Kirk Douglas or, more recently, Julian Schnabel’s woeful At Eternity’s Gate (2018) starring Willem Dafoe. Watkins’ scenes of Munch (incarnated soulfully by non-professional actor Geir Westby) painting are constantly yoked to the artist’s surges of emotion, his moods, his sick fevers and mental perturbations. Then again, it is hard to decide whether this ode to expressionism is a straightforward identification on Watkins’ part (for he, too, has weathered much criticism, censorship and difficulty in his career), or a more ironic, second-degree pastiche of the standard modes of art history (with its emphasis on the artist’s “breakthroughs”, “triumphs” and “setbacks” – words we hear a thousand times on the sountrack) and Hollywood biopic alike. For the film clearly has much more on its mind than an individual’s agony and ecstasy. The filmmaker’s voice-over narration punctuates the montage (again, in a likely pastiche of certain art catalogues) with often surreal recitations of dates and events around the world contemporaneous with Munch’s life and times: various wars and national/territorial redefinitions, but also the invention of the machine gun and the birth of Hitler! And this historical, contextual frame includes, insistently, an emphasis on the double standards that constrained women, both in the interpersonal and artistic spheres, around the turn of the 20th century. The most engaging passages of Edvard Munch are those involving close attention to the tools of painting – a fine level of observation matched subsequently in film history only by Maurice Pialat in Van Gogh and Jacques Rivette in La Belle Noiseuse (both 1991). Watkins recreates the first, 1885 version of The Sick Child in the gradual process of Munch progressively scratching and scouring the canvas (using, for instance, the wooden end of his paintbrush), reducing the image to its essential, sketch-like representation and eliminating stray, naturalistic details. Later, as Munch works on Melancholy in 1891, the voice-over (mixed with the harsh sounds of the artist working upon the canvas) states: Seeking a way of peeling down to the essence of the inner reality, of stripping away needless detail and perspective, Munch now combines all the forms of media at his disposal, using pencil, pastel, oil and charcoal – not separately, but together. He applies the oil thinly to permit the canvas texture to remain a visible component of the finished work – to emphasise its flat surface. He allows the preliminary drawings in pencil and pastel, including the corrections made in them, to remain in the final work to show its spontaneity. Watkins’ treatment of the act of painting here – simultaneously immersed in “live” detail and distant in its present-day, reflective vantage-point – is another way to give (as André Bazin, in a mid 1950s text, wished) both spatial and temporal dynamics to the process of art-making. © Adrian Martin October 2020 |
