Post by petrolino on Feb 2, 2018 22:39:04 GMT
'Edvard Munch' is a biopic of modernist painter and experimental photographer Edvard Munch who influenced German Expressionist Cinema and pioneered "the selfie". It's 221 minutes in length so it takes some effort to sit through. Director Peter Watkins used a professional television crew and freelance cameraman Odd Geir Sæther to authenticate period detail and accentuate a documentary feel. The dialogue mixes excerpts of Munch's diary entries and public confessions with reflections upon his art and position in society. Watkins analyses the controversy that surrounded Munch's work and the death that was all around him.
The dry voiceover narration in this epic docudrama is by Watkins who sometimes invites his actors to talk directly to camera, shooting them as if they've been seated for real-life interviews. Before embarking upon this ambitious project, songwriter John Lennon pondered Watkins' role as an intellectual instigator of the international "bed-in" protest movement. Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman described 'Edvard Munch' as a "work of genius".
"Steffen Kverneland hopes his book will challenge some of the lore that Norway peddles about Munch. "He's been very romanticized, like he existed in a vacuum and he was this haunted genius who never made any bucks and just was devoted to this art. But actually he was quite an entrepreneur and plotted and schemed for his career to make money and stuff like that. I'm not saying he was commercial. He was quite uncompromising. But he always had a general plan." Munch had a real knack for publicity. In 1892, when he was not even 30, he was invited to show his work in Berlin, a city where artists were then steeped in realism. The response to his very emotional works was eye-popping outrage. The exhibit was taken down within a few weeks. Kverneland says Munch was thrilled. "When they took down the exhibition [Munch] said, 'That's the best thing that could ever happen. That's the best publicity you could get. Now I'm famous in Berlin.' And he was right."
- Carol Hills, 'There's More To Norwegian Artist Edvard Munch Than The Scream'
"The shadows that swarmed Munch’s imagination came to him in his childhood when his mother and sister both died of tuberculosis. The loss of his sister struck him terribly and is the theme of one of his first truly personal paintings, The Sick Child (1907), which he originally painted in 1885-6 when he was in his early 20s. This unadorned and utterly heartbreaking deathbed scene haunted him so much he repainted it six times. In this 1907 version the colours are fired by the freedom of expressionism but the pain is as unbearable as it ever was."
- Jonathan Jones, The Guardian
- Carol Hills, 'There's More To Norwegian Artist Edvard Munch Than The Scream'
"The shadows that swarmed Munch’s imagination came to him in his childhood when his mother and sister both died of tuberculosis. The loss of his sister struck him terribly and is the theme of one of his first truly personal paintings, The Sick Child (1907), which he originally painted in 1885-6 when he was in his early 20s. This unadorned and utterly heartbreaking deathbed scene haunted him so much he repainted it six times. In this 1907 version the colours are fired by the freedom of expressionism but the pain is as unbearable as it ever was."
- Jonathan Jones, The Guardian
The dry voiceover narration in this epic docudrama is by Watkins who sometimes invites his actors to talk directly to camera, shooting them as if they've been seated for real-life interviews. Before embarking upon this ambitious project, songwriter John Lennon pondered Watkins' role as an intellectual instigator of the international "bed-in" protest movement. Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman described 'Edvard Munch' as a "work of genius".
"In the second half of his life, Munch (1863-1944) reminded anyone with a mind to read his diaries—of which Watkins’s film makes much use—that : "when I write these notes, it is not to describe my own life. I am writing a study of the soul as I observe myself closely and use myself as an anatomical testing-ground. It would therefore be wrong to look at these notes as confessions. I have chosen—in accordance with Søren Kierkegaard—to split the work into two parts: the painter and his distraught friend the poet. Just as Leonardo da Vinci studied the recesses of the body and dissected human cadavers, I try from self-scrutiny to dissect what is universal in the soul."
What Munch says of his diaries could be applied just as well to the many pictures he produced between the early 1880s, when he was nearing the end of his teens, and his death in 1943. It’s at once one of the main limitations of Watkins’s excavation of the Norwegian painter’s inner life and a primary source of its emotional power that it concentrates on Munch’s unstable, passionate temper at the expense of his fierce intelligence and, no less importantly, on his gift at poetic self-mythologizing. You would hardly guess watching Edvard Munch that the artist was, in fact, an avid reader of high-level mathematical treatises, nor that he was strikingly savvy about courting the public attention he sometimes claimed to resent."
- Max Nelson, Film Comment
"Peter Watkins is a filmmaking hero and his masterpiece Edvard Munch is my favourite movie. These two things have been the case since my professor and Watkins expert (and friend) Dr. Joseph Gomez introduced me to his work when I was an undergraduate at North Carolina State University in the late 1990s. Watkins’ Munch film is a kaleidoscopic, profoundly expressionistic, semi-nonfiction historical bio-pic that does truly radical things with sound and image. The film has influenced me greatly and I return to it regularly, like an old friend. This seems somehow appropriate considering how personal the film was to Watkins – its once beloved, long-since-exiled creator."
- Robert Greene, The British Film Institute
'Solveig's Song' by Edvard Grieg performed by Sissel Kyrkjebø
What Munch says of his diaries could be applied just as well to the many pictures he produced between the early 1880s, when he was nearing the end of his teens, and his death in 1943. It’s at once one of the main limitations of Watkins’s excavation of the Norwegian painter’s inner life and a primary source of its emotional power that it concentrates on Munch’s unstable, passionate temper at the expense of his fierce intelligence and, no less importantly, on his gift at poetic self-mythologizing. You would hardly guess watching Edvard Munch that the artist was, in fact, an avid reader of high-level mathematical treatises, nor that he was strikingly savvy about courting the public attention he sometimes claimed to resent."
- Max Nelson, Film Comment
"Peter Watkins is a filmmaking hero and his masterpiece Edvard Munch is my favourite movie. These two things have been the case since my professor and Watkins expert (and friend) Dr. Joseph Gomez introduced me to his work when I was an undergraduate at North Carolina State University in the late 1990s. Watkins’ Munch film is a kaleidoscopic, profoundly expressionistic, semi-nonfiction historical bio-pic that does truly radical things with sound and image. The film has influenced me greatly and I return to it regularly, like an old friend. This seems somehow appropriate considering how personal the film was to Watkins – its once beloved, long-since-exiled creator."
- Robert Greene, The British Film Institute
'Solveig's Song' by Edvard Grieg performed by Sissel Kyrkjebø
