Product Details

• Actors: Geir Westby, Gro Fraas, Kerstii Allum, Eric Allum, Susan Troldmyr
• Format: Color, NTSC
• Language: English, French, Norwegian
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Homevision
• VHS Release Date: June 20, 2000
• Run Time: 30 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B00000F0VY
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #447,682 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Positing itself as a live documentary filmed between 1884-1894, director Peter Watkins' experimental biography of Norwegian artist Edvard Munch(played by Geir Westby) is an angst-ridden glimpse into the traumatic political and social conditions that birthed Munch's invention of Expressionism. Tracing Munch's rise to infamy, the film begins in Victorian-era Christiania (Oslo), where Munch spent his formative years with a family plagued by disease. It then follows Munch to Berlin, where after studying Symbolism and befriending August Strindberg, Munch finds the impetus to create honest work that mimics his life rife with disconnect and rejection, despite scathing reviews by conservative art critics for his "nervous dissolving treatment of color." Plot-heavy scenes set in his studio and elsewhere are interrupted, as if by Munch's own obsessive memories, by shots of his lost true love, "Mrs. Heiberg" (Gro Fraas), accentuating the loneliness and longing Munch feels for this unattainable married woman. As the film's somber color palette alternates between black and blue, Munch's preferred "colors of death," Munch's interior thoughts are conveyed through Watkins' experimentation with sound and film. The sound made by Munch's brush scratching canvas is, at times, unbearably magnified, for example, and visual montages featuring close-ups of the artist's facial expressions elucidate Munch's disturbed emotional states and fragile nerves. The film's expressive qualities emulate the artist's stylistic approach to his art-making, making Edvard Munch an especially convincing artist's biopic. –-Trinie Dalton

Product Description

Shot on location in Norway and drawing from Munch's paintings and writings, this program explores the origins of some of the most arresting images in European art.

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars DEMANDING BEAUTY DRINKS YOU INTO ITS LIGHT, February 17, 2001

By 

Donald A. Newlove (Greenwich Village) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Edvard Munch [VHS] (VHS Tape)

I've seen this twice, the first time in its theatrical showing, maybe twenty years ago, then more recently on video, which as I recall was also in widescreen. So that's six hours with Watkins' demandingly beautiful film. For awhile I later confused Watkins with David Watkins, the fabulous photographer of OUT OF AFRICA, and for all I know these two filmmakers are related. EDVARD MUNCH is a masterpiece of tonalities. This is a movie about light. You are in a Munch work just by the demanding beauty of the light and of Watkins' inspired painterliness with rich Munch-like blues. The smokey blue scenes in Bohemian bars have the same dense sense of lost time recaptured as do scenes of Munch painting in his attics and scoring his pictures violently as the sharp end of his brush digs into fresh paint and almost rips his canvas. When you think of John Huston's MOULIN ROUGE, a dull film with some good moments, particularly when Lautrec's "hand" draws figures on a restaurant table, we remember mostly idle moments in Lautrec's lovelife (and of course the Can-Can dancers). From EDVARD MUNCH we recall far more extraordinary feelings of being lifted out of ourselves and thrust back into the very rooms Munch lived in and the into the Scandanavian light he worked in and into the tortured set of his mind as he shrank figures into hard, strong, symbolic forms. I await the day this film appears digitally (it was never a laser disc, sad to say, or I'd have it already). Since it may not be issued on DVD for eight or ten years, seek the video cassette version. You will watch it more than once. Maybe not in the same year but it will be a respected treasure that you will thank yourself for having sought out. Or rent it first. Maybe you don't really have to own it if it will be on hand for renting. Still, not all that many stores will have it ready to rent, now that it's out of print. And even if the video is not in widescreen, you will be dazzled just by the blue tones filling the monitor.

20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Dread and the Anguish of the Modern Artist, July 8, 2008

By 

Luca Graziuso (NYC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Edvard Munch-Special Edition 2-DVD Set (DVD)

Peter Watkins' "Edvard Munch" is a biopic that has us peek into the culture and time of Munch's Norway. While we experience the tension and fragility of the artist we are given falshbacks and narrative overlays that strip the "documentary" of any feeling of artificiality. I cannot think of any other documentary that functions with such immersive absorption. Munch's art is the depiction of a soul's shadow with no substance to shade that which it illuminates. The Norwegian painter did not want to submerge the outer world in a welter of subjective colors, as in the work of later expressionists like Georges Rouault and Emil Nolde; or to dissolve it (nearly) in a swirling, intensely private vision, like Van Gogh's paintings or to disturbingly illustrate a tenuous self-pity as in the work of Egon Schile. Nor did he want to ring variations on realism in which the inner world is merely hinted at, as Manet did. Like his contemporary and fellow countryman Ibsen, Munch wanted to make inner life as recognizable as physical reality, and outer life as immediately felt as an emotion.
He neither uses color to excite emotional states in the viewer, which was the aim of the German expressionists Munch influenced, nor employs color to provoke the eye, which was the goal of the French fauves who cleared the path for the German expressionists. For all their symbolic resonances and personal inflections, Munch's colors describe his subjects through indolence and fatigued disarray, with gossamer-light brush strokes visible on the canvas like embodiments of the afflicted pathos and distilled by the gravitas of a melancholy hopelessness.
In Munch, strong feeling both dignifies a person and threatens to destroy his humanity. One of five children and the son of a doctor, his mother 20 years younger than his father, Munch was morbid and offstandish, a waifish dreamer that would not disillusion himself with the revolutionary ascriptions that were in vogue by the Bohemian intelligentsia of his day . He never married and suffered nervous breakdowns throughout his life. His love affairs usually passed through various stages of hysteria into either bleak disappointment or operatic violence. One breakup ended with his fiancee threatening to kill herself with a revolver; Munch tried to get the gun away from her and ended up shooting off part of his middle finger. Like Kierkegaard, or August Strindberg, Munch saw the struggle between men and women as a universal conflict that encapsulated the essence of life. Women in Munch's paintings are often either the highly sexed succubi of fin de siècle, a la Egon Schiele, or free and openly sexual, and somewhat masculine, like Ibsen's Nora in A Doll's House.
Watkins' film is searingly felt attempt to come to terms with a remarkable artist and the social and psychological processes at work in his life and painting.
Munch is perpetually seeking an artistic form that will allow him to investigate, according to the Watkins film, "a new and revolutionary understanding of the human psyche." Seeing the world as he does in wave-lines, "Munch seeks to make our innermost tremble."
Watkins indicates that Munch's psychological self-examination was not merely an individual endeavor, but reflected something significant about the growing self-awareness of a new age. His representation of the relationship between the painter's words and his life-cycle motifs in The Frieze of Life lends insight into the deeply human content of Munch's work, namely his remarkable ability to lift daily life out of deadening routine.
Flora Berman in "Edvard Munch's `Modern Life of the Soul,'" contends that "variously representing chemical, physiological, sexual, and pathological identities, the modern soul was a place of resistance and site of regeneration for vanguard intellectuals at the fin de siecle. Spirituality and social aberrancy were not considered antithetical within this culture, nor within Munch's work. The modern soul became a catchphrase in Scandinavia for the breakthrough generation, the writers of the 1880s and 1890s who rejected naturalist description and embraced interior subjective experience as the foundation of literary investigation."
Berman maintains that Munch saw mental and physical disintegration as a way of distancing himself from mainstream culture. Munch writes: "My whole life has been spent walking by the side of a bottomless chasm, jumping from stone to stone. Sometimes I try to leave my narrow path and join the swirling mainstream of life, but I always find myself drawn inexorably back towards the chasm's edge, and there I shall walk until the day I finally fall into the abyss. For as long as I can remember, I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety which I have tried to express in my art. Without anxiety and illness, I would have been like a ship without a rudder."
Life and the condition of "living" pressed itself so forcefully on Munch, and he was so driven to communicate it, that he disdained any aesthetic logic whatever, thereby always in dissonance with the rigid sterility of the unimpressed art critics of his days. "When seen as a whole, art derives from a person's desire to communicate with another. All means are equally good," argued the artist.
However where the movie excels is in the way Watkins deftly amalgamates the socio-political reality of Munch's Northern Europe with the inner despair that nurses his art. If, as historian Eric Hobsbawm suggests, the high arts in the late nineteenth century "were ill at ease in society," then surely Munch's work must be considered among the most "uneasy". Hobsbawm notes in his masterpiece "The Age of Extremes" that the last two decades of the 19th century witnessed extraordinary changes, combining to create the foundations of modern capitalist society and culture: the growth and unprecedented concentration of industry and finance, the scramble for colonies, remarkable scientific and technological innovation, the appearance of the modern working class and its first great political party, German Social Democracy. And all of this social complexity refracted in various ways, in artistic work, in the writing of history, in the birth of psychoanalysis." This movie exemplifies why we admire and treasure artwork through its allocation of political and social emergence as witnessed by a man's hypersensitive psychological hues.
In the main, it can be said that with Edvard Munch, Peter Watkins has worked towards making real the insightful words of Oskar Kokoschka, the Austrian expressionist painter: "It was given to Edvard Munch's deeply probing mind to diagnose panic and dread in what was apparently social progress." And today Munch is a kin to us all.

18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Watkins would change the world if anyone cared to, October 14, 2003

By 

Jon C. McNeill (Portland, OR USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Edvard Munch [VHS] (VHS Tape)

Edvard Munch is the Citizen Kane that nobody saw. From a storytelling point of view, its portrayal of the constant torment that led to Munch's art is oddly enthralling throughout its 3+ hr length. From a filmmaking point of view, Munch is like no other (except, perhaps, Watkins other later work). To my knowledge, no one has so expertly reproduced the personal thoughts and internal feelings of a man on screen as Watkins does in Munch. Sounds, images, narration, recollections--all float in and out of Munch's consciousness and into ours during this captivating biography on the Norwegian artist most famous for "The Shriek."
Perhaps every aspect of this film is avant-garde, from its editing all the way down to its casting (many parts were played by non-professionals), but perhaps no other movie has enveloped me in its universe the way that Munch does. I have always marveled at how little-known Peter Watkins' Edvard Munch is, and I've been so thankful that it found me. You will be too.