If you watch this three and a half hour movie and absorb its lessons you will walk away more educated than most humans. It is a lesson in the history of western civilization as it entered a crucial turning point - the dawn of the twentieth century, it is a lesson in art history, and in anarchism, it is a primer in gender politics, and a visual artwork in its own right. It is also a depiction of a passion a young man has for a married woman, and of a awakening genius with a growing power to create pictures, steadfastly continuing against a tide of opposition. Munch's claim to fame in popular culture is the image of the Scream / Skrik, but as an artist he was of massive significance, being the first Expressionist in Western Art, using his pictures to show an emotional more than a physical reality.
Edvard Munch is a piece of scholarship and consensual collaboration, a meta-mirror of the spirit of the "Kristiania-bohemen", where Munch cuts his intellectual teeth as a youngster.
Engaging, visually brilliant, a labour of love, it is hard to think that a better movie has ever been made. I will take away many memories, the wonderful recreations of the painting and printmaking processes, the neck kissing, the lovers in shadow, the visual recreations of the Munchian atmospherics, the visual repetition of the abstract patterns in the printers ink and the lake water, the contextualizing of his major works. It's a film that makes even the accompanying characters very interesting, I am keen to find out much more about the messages of Hans Jæger.
We also must not forget that many artists, intellectuals and patriarchs of the time had skewed ideas about women, Watkins very cleverly counterposes this with the voices of wonderful women.
Note that Munch lived until nearly the end of the Second World War, but this film is concerned with the first half of his life.
Edvard Munch is a piece of scholarship and consensual collaboration, a meta-mirror of the spirit of the "Kristiania-bohemen", where Munch cuts his intellectual teeth as a youngster.
Engaging, visually brilliant, a labour of love, it is hard to think that a better movie has ever been made. I will take away many memories, the wonderful recreations of the painting and printmaking processes, the neck kissing, the lovers in shadow, the visual recreations of the Munchian atmospherics, the visual repetition of the abstract patterns in the printers ink and the lake water, the contextualizing of his major works. It's a film that makes even the accompanying characters very interesting, I am keen to find out much more about the messages of Hans Jæger.
We also must not forget that many artists, intellectuals and patriarchs of the time had skewed ideas about women, Watkins very cleverly counterposes this with the voices of wonderful women.
Note that Munch lived until nearly the end of the Second World War, but this film is concerned with the first half of his life.