Montage as subjectivity in Peter Watkins’ Edvard Munch

I sometimes think this might be my favorite film, and it demands a lengthy review. But instead I’ll offer a very brief one.

Peter Watkins, as always, uses a mix of narrative and documentation here, but to much greater effect than in his other movies (that I’ve seen, at least). The film is primarily a biography of Munch, but it also contains detailed analyses of his art and his social milieu. My favorite thing about it is its evocation of Munch’s subjectivity via a very dense use of montage and layers of sound. “Present-day” scenes are constantly intercut with pivotal moments from his past; the sound of sobbing continues over interviews and voiceovers about his art. The method is very reminiscent of Faulkner’s style in The Sound and the Fury, in the way that pivotal past moments anchor and define Munch’s ongoing experience, but the layers of sound and imagery are a denser, more textured style only possible in film. The film is also magnificently self-reflexive: Munch is fixated on capturing his experience in his art, and the movie is fixated on capturing his experience as well as his capturing his fixation on that experience. This self-reflexivity is aided by his stares toward the viewer, allowing the film to take on his subjectivity in multiple ways, not only as consciousness but as self-consciousness. But it goes still further by insisting on the subjectivity of everybody around him. It delves into their past and their own experience, and they too turn and look at the viewer. Furthermore, seemingly random contextualizing bits of history are related in voiceover. But all of this is related back to Munch; it is his experience as a contextualizing and contextualized subject, a subject in an intersubjective context.