Edvard Munch (movie)
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Edvard Munch is a 1973 biographical film about the Norwegian Expressionist painter Edvard Munch, written and directed by Peter Watkins. It was originally created as a three-part miniseries co-produced by the Norwegian and Swedish state television networks NRK and SVT, and has subsequently been shown as a three-hour feature film. The film covers about thirty years of Munch's life, focusing on the influences that shaped his art, particularly the prevalence of disease and death in his family and his youthful affair with a married woman.
Like Watkins' other films, Edvard Munch uses a combination of dramatic and documentary techniques: scenes from Munch's life are enacted by a large cast (mostly Norwegian and mostly nonprofessional actors), but there is also a voiceover narration by Watkins, and there are documentary-style segments in which the characters speak directly to an interviewer about their own lives or their opinions of Munch. Some of the dialogue was improvised by the cast, especially in the interview segments; to convey the hostile response Munch's work often received during his lifetime, Watkins recruited Norwegians who genuinely disliked the paintings.
After its initial broadcast, the film was briefly an international success but then was not widely available for many years; Watkins has said that network officials tried to suppress its distribution, and tried to bar it from competition in the Cannes Film Festival, because they disapproved of its use of nonprofessional actors and anachronistic dialogue. After NRK relinquished rights to the film in 2002, it gained a wider international release.