Shades of Madness

By J.C.

EDVARD MUNCH Directed and Written by PETER WATKINS

The Norwegian artist Edvard Munch lived for 80 years and painted for most of them. His work--striking, fearful, startling--was the vanguard of expressionism; indeed, Munch is, with Van Gogh, frequently considered the progenitor of the whole movement. Peter Watkins' film of Munch's life concentrates solely on the artist's tormented early years.

Watkins first furnishes some rather elementary biographical details. Munch (Geir Westby) was born in Oslo in 1863, second of five children in a family much battered by medical tragedy. Denounced and vilified at the outset of his career. Munch was accepted, even extolled, as he grew older. Watkins also tries to tunnel into Munch's creative spirit, to watch him work and trace his themes of violent mortality and sexual betrayal to their psychic roots.

Along with this already daunting prospect, Watkins wants the audience to share Munch's own furious insights and tilted perceptions. So the movie becomes as gloom-ridden, as frightened and obsessive as the youthful artist himself. Watkins fragments the film, fords the stream of consciousness, forsaking the obvious for the magnification of a detail. The narration (read on the sound track by the director himself) informs us that Munch eventually developed agoraphobia. In a more conventional film, we would have been treated to scenes of the artist reeling down streets, cowering in his room. Not here. Once stated, the agoraphobia is established and--as far as the director is concerned--in no need even of illustration.

Sinister Sensuality. Watkins is more interested in establishing the sensual details of Munch's painting: the sound of a brush dashing paint, a blade peeling pigment off a canvas. Munch's formative affair with a married woman (Gro Fraas) is here devoid of dramatics. Watkins wants us to absorb the colors and emotions of the affair direct from Munch's work, particularly from one, finished in 1893 and full of sinister sensuality, showing a woman leaning close over a man. The painting is titled Vampire. The director dwells on the haunted canvases with a sort of driven fascination, the way another film maker might linger over a scene of lovemaking.

The trouble with this ambitious, demanding movie--which lasts more than 2 1/2 hours--is that it overreaches itself.

Watkins attempts too much: he wants Edvard Munch to be biography and documentary, criticism and speculation, psychological analysis and lyric flight.

In hopes of stirring an intensely subjective response from the audience, he forsakes lucidity and precision. The movie is reckless, a quality that is both exhilarating and, finally, defeating. Like Munch's art, however, it has an embattled, assaultive power that cannot be shaken.

J.C.

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