Synopsis
Edvard Munch (1974) is a Norwegian-Swedish biographical drama by Peter Watkins you can watch online on iFILM. At just under three hours, it traces the painter's early life with a rigour that sets it apart from almost every other artist biopic made in the same era.
Watkins shot the film in a quasi-documentary style: actors speak directly to the camera, archival-style narration cuts across scenes, and time jumps without warning. Geir Westby plays the young Munch, whose childhood is blighted by the deaths of his mother and sister, and who himself barely survives serious illness before reaching adulthood. At university in Christiania he discovers painting and falls in with Hans Jæger — nihilist, provocateur, champion of art stripped of bourgeois decorum — and the combination unlocks something irreversible.
The film's actual subject is the gap between suffering and expression, and what it costs to cross it. Stream Edvard Munch (1974) online on iFILM.
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