Directed by Peter Watkins

1976, 174 mins, Norway/Sweden, 35mm

35mm collection print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive

Sunday, October 11
1:00 PM

Brain Dead Studios
611 N Fairfax Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90036

“A work of genius.” — Ingmar Bergman

We are thrilled to present a rare 35mm screening of the theatrical version of Peter Watkins’ masterpiece, one of the greatest films about art and art-making, in tribute to the late filmmaker (1935-2025). Known for its highly original style, Watkins’ biopic of the great Norwegian artist uses the tropes of a documentary film—direct-to-camera interviews, contrapuntal voice-over and vérité zooms—while employing non-professional actors, creating an utterly modern exploration of Munch’s ascension into the art world of the late 19th century.

“Peter Watkins’s three-hour magnum opus is less a portrait of the great Norwegian painter Edvard Munch than it is an exposure of the artist’s frayed inner life. Indelible images of the painter’s childhood occur and recur; ecstatic moments of human connection punctuate long stretches of boredom, loneliness, and frustration; aesthetic debates within Munch’s Berlin intellectual circle, which included the playwright August Strindberg, unravel at length. The result is an artist biopic—complete with dry voiceover narration—that moves with the logic of a free verse poem or a stream-of-consciousness novel. On one level, Edvard Munch is an exhaustive portrait of a particularly fervent moment in European politics and culture. On another, it’s a painfully intimate study of an individual with a particularly acute sense for, as one character in the film puts it, ‘the mysterious anguish of life’—and the cathartic anguish of art.”

— Film at Lincoln Center

“This 1976 study of the tortured expressionist painter is obsessively detailed (and meticulously researched), but through Watkins’s jittery, subjective montage, it retains a life and madness of its own.”

— Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader

“A moving, complex, beautifully felt portrait of the great Norwegian artist.”

— The New York Times

In Norwegian, Swedish, German, Danish and English with English subtitles.

Flyer by Ellie Sunlight Moon. Special thanks to Todd Wiener and Steven Hill (UCLA Film & Television Archive) and Darrell Brett.