Edvard Munch is an artist that the cinematography did not pay much attention to. This might seem a paradox, considering that he is probably Norway’s greatest painter and an internationally famous artist, and that he had a rather long life full of personal drama and melodrama, with unhappy love stories and psychiatric treatments, with trips to the art capitals of his youth – Paris and Berlin – where he met many of the great artists and intellectuals of the time. Munch even had a special artistic relationship with the camera. And yet, if we exclude the exhibition documentaries, the previous biographical film dedicated to him turns half a century this year. Is the 2023 ‘Munch‘ a biographical film? The director of the film is Henrik Martin Dahlsbakken, a fairly young and very prolific director. In the last four years he has made five other films besides this one – two zombie movies, a family drama set at Christmas and two action films with plots set in the 1920s and during the Second World War respectively. ‘Munch‘ is nothing like any of these, but neither is it like a conventional biopic about Norway’s national painter.
We are dealing with four different episodes from different periods of the painter’s life. The first (chronologically) tells the story of the painter’s falling in love with Milly Thaulow, a married woman with whom Munch had an affair and who did not share his feelings. This disappointment marked his love life and his attitude towards women. The second episode takes place in Berlin, where Munch spent several years in the artistic circles that would give birth to the Blaue Reiter group and German Expressionism, having as a friend, among others, the Swedish writer and playwright August Strinberg. In the third episode we see the artist in one of the difficult moments of his life, hospitalized in a clinic and treated for alcoholism. Finally, the final episode recounts the last years of his life, when Munch, famous but alone, organizes the transfer of his legacy composed of thousands of paintings and other works to the Norwegian state, but especially their protection from the German occupiers. Each episode is made in a different cinematic style, and the role of Munch is played by four different actors. The narratives are interspersed.
Edvard Munch was a revolutionary artist who did not follow the beaten path and who experimented throughout his artistic career. I don’t think that he would have disliked an experimental film like this. I also appreciate experiments in cinema, when they succeed to create emotion, communicate new information and provide new perspectives, or when they are formally interesting. In ‘Munch‘ not everything I saw on the screen made sense to me. The inspiration for this kind of biopic is ‘I’m Not There’ – Todd Haynes’ 2007 movie about Bob Dylan. I didn’t like all the seven episodes there, and I didn’t like all the four episodes here either. The first and the last, seen sequentially, would look like mini docu-dramas, quite close to classic biographies. The second one, the Berlin episode, confused me the most. Bringing Munch into contemporaneity seems to say that the problems of the artists creating in an art metropolis, as Berlin was then and is now, are perennial. But why does Strinberg have to be played by a woman with a pencil-thin mustache? I understand, I think, the problem, but I cannot link it to Edvard Munch. An actress also plays the old Munch in the fourth episode, but there the counter-casting seems more appropriate there. The most successful episode seemed to me to be the third, the one of his time in the clinic, filmed in black and white, austerely acted. It is from this kind of environment that the artist Munch emerged and this may have been the suffering that shaped his destiny and his art. It is the only one of the episodes where the muted Scream is being heard.
