Edvard Munch
Peter Watkins 1973
The immediate refusal to uphold the ‘fourth wall’ in Watkins’ film
was compelling considering how early on in the film it came. There was
no slow build up to establish a contained reality that would then
shattered – its dismissal was signalled from the start. Strange faux
interviews are conducted with workers, sometimes talking heads or
surrounded by children, describing their conditions, their standards of
living or the social mores of the day – a curious bleeding between
social-realist documentary styles of the early seventies and a
pre-cinema Kristiania (Oslo). The acknowledgement of the camera, as it
were, continued throughout the film. The cast of amateur actors are
forever looking out, catching the camera as if it were an attendant
presence against which a look of despondency or despair could be thrown.
This was all in the service of a rhythm of sympathy that the film began
to build up over the course of its three and a half hour running time –
a method by which you were continually drawn into the concerns of those
people in front of you by (almost physically) being implicated at every
turn. It was like watching an unfolding drama and being dragged into
proceedings through constantly being looked at, at times as direct and
accusatory as a pointing finger. Although Watkin apparently thinks of
the ‘fourth wall’ as an ‘elitist barrier’, I’m still unsure as to the
effect of its remaining presence here – as it were a now a tattered
curtain that hangs in front of the images either as a textural overlay
or an impedance. For me its effect was strangely intoxicating – when the
young actor playing Munch (Geir Westby) achieved his rhythmic turns to
the camera, it was never in a comedic way, or indeed, if it makes sense
to say, in a way that really broke the surface tension of the
world in which the character existed. The actor’s deadpan portrayal
suited this process admirably – his visual asides never Brechtian or
Laurel & Hardy, but something else. I cannot really figure out what
it was doing in fact. For this was established and sustained throughout –
the film reminded me a great deal of Sokurov’s Russian Ark,
even though its techniques and concerns are no doubt very different. It
provided a hallucinatory access to a kind of dream world that became, as
it were, the possession of the camera. It was less like being
told a story than be allowed to process a stretch of individual
experience that was unbroken either by its immersion into the
‘character’ of a certain world or by the constant awareness of its
theatrical unreality. In some ways I think the film managed to put
together a specifically pitched ‘partial’ world – somehow precisely
unfinished – that allowed gaps, like negative space, for the viewer to
come in and attach themselves. the was also compounded by the other
methods used – the extremely slow pace and recurrent imagery, which
allowed characters and events to be accompanied and revisited at various
points in the narrative. In any case, the narrative, was clustered
around points of obsession and repetition both in relation to Munch’s
work and life – themes of pain, illness, rejection and despair that were
articulated around tiny details that we were allowed (I suppose
assuming that we are that way inclined) to pore over too, to obsess and
distort, as images took on more and more import. This was the case with
the portrayal of the affair with the married ‘Mrs Heiburg’ – tiny
moments are returned to again and again, sometimes split into sound
layers that colour other events, everything starting to bleed over all
of the divisions achieved in the patterns of the edit. This build up of
images, at a pace that allowed them to be lived with, to be irritated or
exhausted by, constructed a psychological constellation more angularly
expressive than one battened together through other, fast track means of
mainstream cinema or switching edits of the mass media. Watkin replaces
the bombardment of rapid editing by another kind of bombardment – that
of obsessive, overturning disillusionment and solitude. The filmmaker’s
commitment to slow pacing and the confidence to remain with, and return
to images until they have begun to assume a materiality they would not
otherwise have, allows the film to be absorbed slowly. Images are used
as tools for reflection in the multiple sense of the term, both allowing
us to fall into or think through them, or to allow them – e.g.
the portrayal of many of Munch’s canvases – to be presented as complete
surfaces that a camera can survey like a contemplative version of a
helicopter-shot over a landscape.
The treatment of The Sick Child is strange – its uniquely
erratic and violent composition signalling it as an expressionist
breakthrough, but its genesis lost in a mix of formal and emotional
causes. Watkin’s attempts to link the turbulence in Munch’s life and
work to the events of the age – listing concurrent events around the
globe – come across as a little undeveloped and his voiceover, which was
otherwise very effective, did put me in mind of Adam Curtis and his
political survey documentaries – which is perhaps not such a random
association given the obvious political concerns in Watkin’s work. The
themes of artistic isolation and commitment, as well as relentless
critical rejection, are also related to Watkin, and the filmmaker
apparently makes reference to his clear identification with Munch –
which, I suppose, adds another degree of intrigue into the constant
‘gazes out’ that pepper the film – the actors looking out at the
director, not in search of some direction or advice, but to remind him
that he’s in front of the camera as much as they are.
