Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Edvard Munch
1974 · Peter Watkins · Edvard Munch on Sightlines
A man's voice, level and informed, gives a date. Under it someone is whispering, too close to the microphone to be part of the scene. On screen a young man stands at an easel and scrapes at wet paint, taking off what he spent the afternoon putting on. Cut. A different room, years earlier. A girl lies in bed, and the light is the color of a candle.
That is the rhythm of Peter Watkins's Edvard Munch. For the first stretch it feels like interruption. After a while it starts to feel like the only honest way to tell this life.
The sickroom comes back. It comes back a lot. Munch's sister Sophie and his mother die in those shadowed, lamp-lit rooms, and Watkins keeps returning to them. He doesn't do it once, as backstory. He does it again and again, with the same images and sounds restated at intervals while the adult Munch moves through the cafés and studios of 1880s Kristiania. A conventional biopic would spend one flashback here: this is the wound, and now you understand the art. Gilles Deleuze has a name for that kind of flashback, the recollection-image. It is a past moment, dated and filed, brought up to explain the present. Watkins won't use it that way. The sickbed explains nothing, and it never leaves.
Deleuze, drawing on the philosopher Henri Bergson, offers a better account of what is happening. The past, he argues, is not a pile of old presents stacked up behind us. It exists all at once, alongside the present, like a vast territory, and memory works by jumping into one layer of it or another. He calls these layers sheets of past. This is worth knowing because it changes how you watch the cuts. Don't wait for each return of the sickroom to resolve into a cause. Notice instead that it is already there in the café, in the studio, inside the affair with the married Mrs. Heiberg. The film's associative editing is not a filing system. It is a map of a mind for which 1868 and 1890 are both happening now.
The sickroom again.
Geir Westby, a non-professional like nearly everyone in the cast, plays Munch as watchful and withdrawn. Around him the Kristiania Bohème talks without stopping, and Hans Jæger's nihilism fills the rooms. Munch absorbs it more than he answers it. In Deleuze's history of cinema, the classical hero perceives a situation and acts to change it. After the war, films began to produce a different figure, the seer: someone who can only look, because the situation is too large or too painful to answer with an action. Munch is that figure, with one complication. He has a brush. Watkins shows painting as labor and as violence against the surface. Canvases are worked, scraped, reworked and physically abused. Does that count as acting? It changes nothing in the world. The critics still sneer, and the society that met early modernism with hostility stays hostile. What the painting does is turn looking into a surface you can keep. The film leaves that question open, and it is the best question it asks.
The camera is anxious too. Odd-Geir Sæther shoots handheld, pressing against faces, hands and half-finished pictures. It drifts, reframes, and lingers. Deleuze's term for this is the dicisign: the camera watching someone who is watching, while we feel the camera's own presence. Watkins makes that presence impossible to forget, because his characters turn and speak to it. A woman of the 1880s answers the questions of an interviewer who belongs to the 1970s. Watkins invented this anachronism in Culloden, where historical non-professionals gave testimony on a reconstructed battlefield. The War Game gave him the newsreel grammar: jittery framing, cold narration, dense layered sound. In Punishment Park the amateurs improvised in front of a visible crew. Munch takes all of that and turns it inward. The overlapping sound of reportage becomes the whispering of a single head.
The faces carry what the bodies won't. Here the debt runs back to Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc and its available-light close-ups on raw faces. Deleuze calls the close-up an affection-image, a feeling registered but not yet released into action. One variety he names the potisign: a face where small movements build intensity toward a threshold that is never crossed. The amateur cast is extraordinary at this. You see hesitations, glances that stop short, silences that fill with something. In a film about repression, the threshold that never gets crossed is the whole drama.
Then the narrator returns with dates and analysis. The film is built on a split between sound and image. The English commentary pulls you out to consider history while the image holds you inside a man's grief. Deleuze calls this audiovisual disjunction: voice and picture no longer serve a single scene, and each starts to tell its own story. Watkins doesn't push it as far as Marguerite Duras would, but the gap is real, and the viewer has to stand inside it.
This is also where the film earns its place in film theory. André Bazin trusted the documentary image because it carried an imprint of the real. Watkins borrows every sign of that trust (the handheld camera, the interview, the authoritative voice) and attaches them to a reconstruction. He isn't lying to us. He is asking why those signs make us believe, and he answers by making the past feel reported live.
The lineage has one more twist. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari founded Expressionism by bending the sets into the shape of a disturbed mind, and Munch's painting helped bring that movement into being. Watkins's rooms are not bent. What he distorts is time and sound. That is a quieter Expressionism, and it may be the more truthful one. Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin taught him that two colliding shots can produce a third meaning. In Munch the third meaning doesn't arrive as an idea. It arrives as a picture on an easel.
What did this do to the biopic? The film has no three-act arc. There is no triumph and no explanation, only repetition, digression, and one man's grief set inside a social panorama. Watkins carried the method all the way to La Commune (Paris, 1871). The film itself makes a harder claim, which is that biography is not a line. It is a present that the past keeps breaking into.
So when the sickroom comes back yet again, don't ask what it means. Ask where it has landed: which face, which conversation, which stroke of the scraper. Then look at the canvas.
Concepts in play
- sheets of past (coexistence of the past) — Associative rather than chronological editing: recurring flashes of Sophie's and the mother's sickbeds and deaths are restated as motifs throughout the 1880s–90s present, so the past keeps breaking into it instead of serving as a single explanatory flashback.
- the seer (voyant) — Westby's Munch is watchful, withdrawn and absorbed amid the talk of the Kristiania Bohème and Jæger. His one outlet is painting, shown as labor and violence against the canvas, and it does not change the society's hostility.
- dicisign — Sæther's handheld camera acts as an anxious observer, pressing against faces and hands, drifting and reframing. Characters turn and address it in interview-style testimony, which makes the camera's presence explicit.
- potisign (icon of power) — Available-light close-ups on non-professional faces, with their hesitancy, glances and silences, build repressed feeling that is never released into action (the debt to Dreyer's Joan).
- audiovisual disjunction — A layered soundtrack sets whispered interior monologue under and over dialogue, while Watkins's English narration supplies dates and analysis over immersive images. Sound pulls toward critique while the image pulls toward empathy.
- crisis of the action-image — No three-act arc and no triumphal biopic resolution. The film advances by repetition and digression, and the protagonist's acts never resolve the situation he perceives.