“Munk”: Exploded Portrait of the Tortured Artist

The opinion of the “world” – why not

The previous film about Edvard Munch (1863-1944) takes us back to 1974, the release date of the great feature film. Edvard Munch, The Dance of Life, by the Englishman Peter Watkins, whose integral narrative and formal approach seemed to hold a mirror to the artist, the complexity of his personality and creativity. Therefore, it was necessary to wait fifty years for another filmmaker to dare to confront this universally known artist, whose diversity of style has never ceased to infuriate critics and fans in his time.

This filmmaker, who is also Norwegian, knows Munch, as he says, “most of all [ses] compatriots » since childhood. However, the artist born in the same country did not spare Henrik Martin Dalsbakken (going back to home2015 year; cellar2016 year; Action2018) long research and writing work.

It took him five years to achieve it Munch. A film with chaotic contours that likesEdvard Munch, The Dance of Life, is freed from linear rules and formal conventions. As if it was to protect the artist from any academicism at all costs.

Break free from linear rules

Henrik Martin Dalsbakken defends it and shakes off the narrative chronology in favor of a fragmented story covering four defining periods of the artist’s life and work. First, his younger years, during a vacation in Westfold County, where young Edward fell in love with a married woman. Then his 30th anniversary, which the filmmaker chose to present in the Berlin of the 2000s, where, due to criticism and rejection, the artist abandons himself to long monologues and gets drunk in the thick heat of nightclubs. His 40th birthday follows, represented by a stint in a mental institution, where Munch, a prey to all kinds of enlightenment, confides his anxieties and artistic questions to Dr. Daniel Jacobson. Finally, Old Age, where an artist locked in his house observes the preservation of his works in German-occupied Norway.

To each of these periods, the filmmaker chose to ascribe his own aesthetics (from naturalism to black and white, through hyperrealism) and to Munch a different interpreter, an artist at the age of 20, 30, 40, respectively. Actors Alfred Ecker Strand, Mattis Hermann Nyqvist, Ola G Furuset, then, late in life, actress Anne Kriegswall. This radical choice, intended to reflect both Munch’s personal vertigo and the various fields of inquiry to which he devoted himself throughout his life, has at least the double merit of avoiding the painterly effect (‘in such a way’) and simplification—the man as much as his work.