Peter Watkins—Notes and Questions: (3) Edvard Munch

By John Gianvito

One of best pieces of cinema news of the past year most certainly should be the theatrical re-storing and re-issuing of Watkins’ 1973 film Edvard Munch (thanks to the stalwart efforts of Oliver Groom and his Toronto-based distribution company Project X, who will eventually also be releasing it on DVD). Regarded by many as Watkins’ most perfectly realized artistic achievement, Edvard Munch is nothing short of the examination of the soul of one artist by another, and by extension a journey into Watkins’ own spiritual struggle and aspirations. Despite Watkins’ consistent career-long engagement with issues of political and social relevance it is curious how rarely the political dimensions of Munch are taken note of by critics. With his permission, Peter Watkins has allowed me to selectively excerpt some of his thoughts on the creation of the Munch film and its impact on his later work from a recent self-interrogation.

Cinema Scope: How did you come to make Edvard Munch?

Peter Watkins: In the winter of 1968 I was working in Stockholm , editing The Gladiators, which was shot entirely in Sweden . I was invited by the University of Oslo to a screening of Culloden and The War Game (or maybe just Culloden, I can’t remember now). As it so happened, the screening took place in a large hall at the Munch Museum in Oslo . During the screening, I wandered around the exhibition and had my first introduction to the works of Edvard Munch. It was a complete shock. I had never heard of Munch, and had never seen canvases like this, especially the ones expressing—for Munch doesn’t “show,” he expresses—the suffering of his family. For example, the large canvas depicting the death of his sister Sophie in 1875, is painted as though the event took place some 15 or 20 years later—that is to say, the sorrowing brothers and sisters grouped around Sophie are portrayed as being in their 20s, whereas at the time of Sophie’s death they were much younger. I was very moved by Munch’s use of space and form, his displacement of time, and the directness of the confrontation with the spectator. On one side of Death in the Sickroom we have his younger sister Inger staring directly at us. From the time of Culloden, I had been working with this same process of contact with the viewer, asking the people in my films to look into the camera at certain moments. It is a way of removing the so-called “fourth wall”—the elitist barrier in films that acts as a separation between actor and viewer, and between filmmaker and viewer. For me, this wall represents a kind of security blanket for filmmakers, which allows them not to acknowledge the audience as participants in the media process. So I was very moved to discover that Edvard Munch also wanted to strip away this barrier.

What I am trying to say is that I discovered—I felt—a very deep affinity to this Norwegian artist. This was also the period in my life when I had just left Britain due to the hostility which was already being manifested there towards my film work. The War Game had been banned by the BBC, and Privilege had been savagely attacked by the British critics. I did not realize in those initial moments in the Munch Museum how much Edvard Munch’s artistic struggle—and the opposition to his work, especially in his own country—paralleled my own experiences. But I quickly came to understand that in making a film about Edvard Munch, I was also making a film about myself.

Scope: And yet, your film is a documentary, isn’t it?

Watkins: I think that “documentary” has become an entirely artificial and misleading, even dangerous expression. I think we need to ask, “How is one film a documentary, and another not?” What is the difference between “documentary” and “fiction”? Given the standardization in the mass audiovisual media, I think there is no difference at all now. Most documentaries are as highly constructed—and usually at least as manipulative—as Hollywood-type films. They almost all use the Monoform, and the “up and down” drama curves of the Hollywood narrative structure. They almost all manifest the same hierarchical ideology as the mass audiovisual media—trying to “grab” the audience with “impact” and other devices of form and narrative, in order to mould reaction, rather than allowing space and the possibility to react in terms of the audience’s own individual reflections and interpretations.

The old bogeyman of “objectivity” plays a key role in this problem. Many “documentary” film and TV makers think of themselves as being “objective”—while refusing to debate how their use of the Monoform completely contradicts this. To be fair, some filmmakers are aware of the dichotomy which exists because of their dependence on an increasingly corrupt media system for financing, and some do try to confront this. But most don’t, and the unfortunate fact is that the media crisis has become as severe as it is, partially due to the complicity of many filmmakers—including those who make “documentary” films.

In my work I have tried to confront the notions of “documentary reality” and “objectivity” by deliberately staging my films as though they are “happening.” And by building into this illusion a number of challenging elements, including ambiguities, which expose the constructed nature and fictional aspect of the films. I believe this tension between so-called “reality” and “fiction” to be an extremely important field for the audiovisual media to explore. But it is one which the present power-brokers of TV and the commercial cinema resist enormously, because they are afraid of losing their own power, prestige and control—which could happen if the public became too involved in challenging the present hierarchical restraints placed over all mass audiovisual communications.

Scope: Can you say something in general about what you call the “marginalization” of your work?

Watkins: It’s very difficult to speak briefly about this. While we were living in Canada , I wrote a lengthy analysis of the media crisis, including marginalization, for my website, which you can access at: www.mnsi.net/~pwatkins.

But in general, I am quite certain that this marginalization is deliberate and consciously planned. Since the 70s, film critics have sneered at me for being “paranoid”—both in my films, and because I proclaimed that my work was being marginalized. I wonder what they would say now, all these years later... given what has happened not only to my work, but to TV and cinema in general.

There are always professionals in the global film establishment who would steadfastly deny that there is any media crisis. This is mainly because these people—many of whom have a vested interest in such questions not being raised—absolutely refuse to admit that the cinema or TV have any harmful impact, or any role in society other than to entertain, inform (in a purely neutral sense), or stimulate intellectually and creatively. This categorical denial by the mass audiovisual media—and by many in the education system —that the cinema and TV might play a political role, or have a manipulative effect in society, has existed since the 70s.

It’s almost as if “political” and “manipulative” are dirty words that should not be applied to TV or global cinema. Unfortunately, many cinephiles unwittingly join forces with the mass media and the conservative education system, when they try to safeguard the “purity” of cinema against any critical analysis. I am not speaking now of individual films or TV programs, but of the entire audiovisual machinery in general, which I believe is having a catastrophic impact on global society. The dilemma is that many fine cinema works—including films d’auteur—also come from within this machinery. Many use the Monoform and have a strictly hierarchical relationship towards the audience—and it is this area which many people do not wish to debate or to acknowledge as being in any way a problem. So the silence which continues on the role of the mass audiovisual media... and the marginalization of my work—simply because my films and my writings try to raise a public debate on these issues—is part of this overall crisis.

Scope: Are you saying that there is something “political” about Edvard Munch? Surely this film is mostly about the creative process?

Watkins: I find that most media professionals, including critics, are loathe to acknowledge that Edvard Munch is—among other things—a political work, and refuse to discuss, or allow it to be discussed in political terms. Vivid examples of this happened recently in France , where some cinema owners did not want the group which was releasing the film to hold any discussions in the cinema regarding the political meaning and role of the film. And a leading French film magazine pointedly removed most of the references I made to the political meaning of the film and to the crisis in the media, from an interview I reluctantly agreed to participate in.

This is really dangerous. I have to ask, what is not “political” in a work of art, especially one using as powerful a means of communication as the cinema or TV? And where is the separation between artistic struggle and social engagement? I believe there is no separation at all, especially in the case of an artist such as Munch who challenged so many aspects of the reactionary society in his time. While it is true that Munch’s work dealt mostly with life’s pain, and with relations between men and women, we need to be very careful when relegating these areas to the “non-political.”

Some of Munch’s later works (outside the period covered in the film) express his political sympathies—especially in his distinctive painting of haggard Norwegian workers leaving the factory to go home. Also, we must remember that Munch was very much influenced by Hans Jaeger, the Norwegian novelist and anarchist, leader of the “Kristiania Bohème,” a group of urban artists and writers in revolt against conventional morality. Jaeger’s role in Norwegian literature stems in part from suppression by the police of his first novel, due to its overtly sexual theme. Munch’s association with Hans Jaeger and his circle in Kristiana during the 1880s became a crucial turning point in the artist’s life, and a source of new inner unrest and conflict. In keeping with Jaeger's ideas, Munch decided that—in depicting his own life and that of his family—he wanted to present truthful close-ups of the modern individual's longings and agonies.

Edvard Munch deeply sensed the angst running through society, the existential fear of man’s seeming incapacity to learn from history, to lurch from one war to another, from one unjust social system to the next. I believe that Munch had a deep foreboding of the future—of the coming two world wars, mass starvation, ecological collapse. Munch stated, in relation to The Scream—of seeing the “flaming sky like blood,” and feeling “a great endless scream through nature.” Oscar Kokoschka, the Austrian expressionist painter, described this when he wrote: “It was given to Edvard Munch’s deeply probing mind to diagnose panic and dread in what was apparently social progress.”

I think we can also postulate that Edvard Munch saw, or felt, man’s growing alienation from himself and from others. Which is even more true today than in Munch’s time, with the growing egotism and privatization of contemporary society, its utter lack of collectivity, with people’s growing lack of self-autonomy, and their dependence on the “system.”

In its repeated references to various ominous events in history, posited alongside simultaneous events in Edvard Munch’s life, my film is attempting to relate the artist’s inner angst to the external social and political reality—because of course in so many ways they are indelibly linked.

Finally, the film has a very strong social and political thread running through its opening section, in its depiction of the startling differences between the living conditions of the bourgeois and the working class sectors of Kristiania society at the time when Munch began painting. These highly visible social disparities must have affected Munch very much, especially after he met Hans Jaeger.

Scope: Are there other levels where you see Edvard Munch in a political role?

Warkins: Yes, in its presentation of history and its confrontation with the role of the contemporary mass media. Edvard Munch stresses the importance of our relationship to history, and underscores the complexity of that relationship. The film directly challenges the simplistic and manipulative way in which history and life itself are so often presented by the mass audiovisual media. The film does this by working in a complex structure, one in which past, future and present swirl in and out of each other, in which complex patterns of repetition, fragments of memory, recurring motifs, the use of sound, the breaking of rigid synchronisation, and the disjuncture between image and sound, all play a key role... as they do in the lives of each of us. This is how we human beings experience life. And yet this experience bears little, if any, resemblance to the rigidly structured presentations with which the mass audiovisual media bombards the world every single day. Today, the majority of cinema films and TV programs (including news broadcasts) which claim to be dealing with our past and present history, codify our audiovisual experience of this history into hierarchical and rigid forms, including through standardized editing patterns and narrative structures which are completely antithetical to our actual way of experiencing life.

Edvard Munch tries to counter this reactionary and dangerous tendency, by using a complex form which hopefully ensures that people have varying reactions to it. This directly confronts another standard requirement/demand of the media—a MONO form in order to obtain a MONO reaction from everyone in the audience, at the same moment to the same element. This is why the audiovisual media continually bombard us with simplified and repetitive structures, mostly in the manner of the Hollywood narrative, rigidly bolted together via the editing grid of the Monoform. The more complex form of Edvard Munch on the other hand, attempts to demonstrate that we are all history, past, present and future. That we all participate in sharing and sensing that which flows about us, backwards and forwards, sometimes simultaneously, without limitations of time or space...or perhaps of rigid editing structures.

The mass audiovisual media are deeply afraid of working with any “more complex form of living history.” They are afraid of unleashing public debate which moves outside the fixed control of the media, and because of this fear they often disparage the audience, claiming that people are not interested in large or complex themes, that they are bored by them. This is an outrageously elitist and arrogant accusation, which the people who appear in Edvard Munch, as well as those who have seen the film, totally reject.

Scope: Are you saying that the people in the film have a political role as well?

Watkins: It is really important to keep in mind that the people who appear in Edvard Munch are all members of the public—there isn’t a professional actor among them. What this means, in effect, is that the film is working with the Norwegian public to represent an important era of its own history. Given what I have said about the ways in which the mass media constrain and structure the representation of history, I believe that the process by which the “actors” in my films participate in the creative act shows that political action can be linked to creative action. It is a process by which the public take charge of the way that history is presented—or at least more charge than what is usually allowed by the media.

“I shall paint living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love,” said Edvard Munch about his work. This is exactly what the mass audiovisual media are so afraid of: people and their feelings. And why they have gone to immense lengths to deny people any meaningful participation in the creation of TV as a truly public medium.

Admittedly the level of participation by the public in Edvard Munch is nowhere near as extended as happened in my later films (The Journey, The Freethinker, La Commune) but nonetheless it is there, and needs to be recognized as a critical statement about the hierarchical control of the media.

Several examples of how this happened...The first is the manner in which Geir Westby and Gro Fraas worked with the roles of Edvard Munch and Mrs. Heiberg. Both of them brought elements of their own lives into their portrayal of these two people; a number of the dialogue scenes included their own reactions to the events at hand. When we were preparing their scenes, I would ask: “How would you respond if you were in Mrs. Heiberg’s situation, or if you were Edvard Munch in these circumstances?” and they would often formulate their own responses. Take the scene where Mrs. Heiberg and Edvard Munch confront each other in Munch’s studio cabin in Asgardstrand, in the summer of 1889. Munch, deeply upset, accuses Mrs. Heiberg of having another lover, and she responds by saying that he does not possess her as an object, and that his jealousy is pushing her away. This dialogue is a combination of elements suggested by me, elements arising from entries in Edvard Munch’s dairies, and elements which the two actors contributed from their own identification with this situation. This is an example of “living history,” where elements of the past and present fuse together in the presentation of a historical event.

There are three or four scenes in the film where I ask the women of the Kristiania Bohème about their feelings on relationships and marriage. Here, much more so than in the scene between Munch and Mrs. Heiberg, the two women reply (directly to camera) on the basis of their own feelings and experiences. My understanding of Norwegian was not very good, so mostly I did not know what they had said to the camera until the editing stage, when their statements were translated. What the women said was very critical of marriage, and very revealing about the problems in relationships with men. Obviously, in this case, their statements deeply reflected their own feelings. When I used to talk about this aspect of working with people, media professionals would often react in a bewildered or amused way. So many in the audiovisual media world have unfortunately been educated and indoctrinated in a process of such tight control towards the audience, that these examples of personal freedom, and the liberating use of hazard or chance in filmmaking merely appear as anomalies in the traditional media environment—where the director is “king,” and rigid control is called “professionalism.”

Scope: What about your own relationship to Edvard Munch? How did it affect your filmmaking?

Watkins: I think that the main impact on my work, on the making of this film, came from the intensity of the similarity I felt to Edvard Munch as a man, as an artist, as someone who struggled throughout his life. This intensity—combined with the angst I was feeling at the time about the growing attacks on my own work—definitely shaped the form and structure of Edvard Munch, and thus played a role in the direction of my later work.

Scope: Can you describe that impact further?

Watkins: This is not easy. It may sound paradoxical, but once I made Edvard Munch, I think I passed some sort of watershed in my work. As I have explained, in this film I employed an extremely fast cut and fragmented filmic structure—and I never wanted to do that again! It took several more films before I began to work in the direction of the more open form of The Journey, The Freethinker, La Commune. This new direction did not develop until after I had made an analysis of the Monoform during a summer course with Professor Jim Shenton’s students in the history department at Columbia University , in 1977. After that experience, I felt—I still feel—that I could never again work with a filmic structure like the one in Edvard Munch. I had achieved something there of a highly personal nature, and explored the limits (for me) of rapid montage. I also felt that I couldn’t go down that path again even if I wanted to, because my relationship to Edvard Munch was of a highly individual and special nature, something that I could not repeat in a film about another human being.

But there are a number of elements in Edvard Munch which I have tried to continue to develop. One is the indirect lighting, another is the highly complex use of sound (see, for example, my global peace film, The Journey). There is also the process of working with the actors. As I explained, Edvard Munch is a very personal application of the process of having the public work with (and via) the audiovisual media, to present themes of their own history. This I have really tried to develop and extend (as, for example, in La Commune ).

Then there is the crucial question of length. Alongside the Monoform is the deeply ingrained aspect of the media crisis which insists that all TV programs must be chopped down to the same condensed, regulated chunks of time. This practice of rigidly formatting all TV programs, including “documentaries,” into standard lengths (“time slots”) of 47 or 52 minutes for “longer” films, and 26 minutes for shorter ones, is adhered to in order to comply with a specified amount of commercial advertising in each hour or half-hour of program time. Thus, pieces of audiovisual “information” which have already been standardized by the Monoform, are further standardized when presented to the public into uniform lumps of time. This eliminates any priority in what is transmitted, or any idea that different subjects or filming styles might require different lengths of time: everything is thrown into the same time-mincing-machine and spat out in the same Monoform grid-lock.

The Orwellian, arrogant assumption here is that not only can time be arbitrarily adjusted by TV executives (a TV clock “hour” = 47 minutes), but that this new ‘time standard’ can, and should be, applied globally! This practice is actually referred to as applying the universal clock. Standardizing the length of all TV shows, films and documentaries has the added attraction for TV stations faced with an unexpected empty “slot,” of being able to find a replacement program simply by reaching into the film library and pulling out the first thing they touch—the sole criterion is length. Content is completely irrelevant—it is all uniform, audiovisual “stuff.” This is why many media professionals are so afraid of the ‘extended’ use of time: not only does it challenge the ‘universal clock’, it might also give the public space to reflect and intervene—including in the media process—which of course is an anathema in the eyes of the media profession.

The original television version of Edvard Munch was three-and-a-half hours long. I did not want to be tied down to regulated chunks of time in which to express myself, and in which to depict the life and work of Edvard Munch. And, as I have explained, I wanted to give the audience time to work with the complex themes of life and relationships depicted in the film—a concept that is now strictly taboo in the media.

I seem to have covered many different issues and questions here, and have probably repeated certain themes and aims in my work. But I think that repetition is important, especially if it helps to examine certain factors in different contexts.

This ends a series of articles by John Gianvito and Peter Watkins.

Edvard

Articles in this Section

Double ‘O’ Heaven: The Vertigo Pop and Phantom Desires of João Pedro Rodrigues
By Johnny Ray Huston

Web only

Peter Watkins—Notes and Questions: (3) Edvard Munch
By John Gianvito

Brief Glimpses of Beauty: Jonas Mekas at the 2005 Venice Biennale
By Jon Davies

and in the magazine...

The Beat Goes On: The Films of Nagasaki Shunichi By Christoph Huber

Severed Ties: Forgotten Singaporean Cinema Remembered
By Brandon Wee

Peter Watkins—Notes and Questions: (2) La Commune By John Gianvito

Mr. Costa Goes to Vienna By Quintín