Critics reviews

Watkins’ technique of collage-like editing confuses time and memory within a linear account of Munch’s life and its narrative technique is very distinct... All this combines to an effect as startling as one of the painter’s own canvasses – you wouldn’t call it cheerful, but it will leave a lasting impression.

It is as an attempt to find a cinematic vocabulary with which to "paint the fleeting moment of significance" that Edvard Munch arrives at its most staggering effects. When Watkins is at his best, few other filmmakers could shoot a historical re-enactment with such attention to what it would have been like to be there in a particular studio, bedroom, café, or bar, struck by a particular barrage of smells, proximities, blushes, emanations, fragments of music, and casts of light.

Though shot like a documentary, complete with scenes of its actors addressing the camera through “interviews” and stealing nervous sidelong glances at the lens, the film is edited in a kind of lyrical, nonlinear fashion, as though viewers were being tugged back and forth through time by Munch’s own recollections.

...Another prominent nonfiction element of the film is that it features many Norwegian non-actors speaking directly to the camera about their real emotional experiences as working-class people. Dressed in 1880s-era costumes, these interview subjects... are performing themselves, creating expressive art from reality, which mimics the goals of the artist himself. Images are repeated and sounds from scenes continue into the next scene, profoundly conjuring the hazy, alienated state of Munch's mind.

I make arts documentaries for a living and I think this film is one of the greatest artist biopics ever made. Other filmmakers, such as Ken Russell and Derek Jarman, have attempted to transcend biography and analysis and re-create an artist's subjective vision, but few have been as successful as Watkins.

Munch and his mistress react to each other... but the filmmaker’s mosaic structure has the effect of time standing still for long stretches while we take in Munch as if he himself were an experience, not a character in a story.

Ingmar Bergman regarded this film, which Watkins also wrote and edited, as a masterpiece.

The life may be Munch’s, but the vision belongs to Watkins. Although Munch was as much imagemaker as painter—at least during the 1890s, when he produced that great icon of panic The Scream, 1893—Watkins is significantly less interested in Munch’s subject matter than in the conditions of the artist’s existence and the frenzy of his technique.

Though haunting, the film is also admirably precise in its documentation of Munch's work process, with a fine tactile sense lacking in most movies about two-dimensional artists.

Edvard Munch, in Watkin’s subjective documentary setting, is one of the penultimate cultural crusaders, a relic of a dying era in which individualism could, apparently, still conceivably be intuitive and not reactionary.

No art is created in a vacuum, neither Munch’s nor Watkins’, and this film reflects its historical moment of the mid-1970s, a time when international uprisings against power had been betrayed or thwarted, and idealism became distracted by the newly receding boundaries on sexual frankness.

Art historians may object that this hardly gives a complete picture of the man who, though tormented, perhaps psychotic, continued to work fruitfully with increasing recognition for another 35 years, dying at 80, a substantial age for anyone but especially for someone so ravaged by the demons within. That may be so, but "Edvard Munch," though it's based upon the life and celebrates the talent of a real artist, is fiction, as are all films except possibly newsreels.