Edvard Munch's films
In 1927 Edvard Munch experimented for the first time as a film photographer.
Munch's films, 1927. © Munchmuseet
Edvard Munch’s recordings can best be described as the charming experiments of an amateur. This was, however, an amateur with a long-term exploration of motion in art and photography.
The artist's amateur films, stitched together in above, were shot in Dresden, Oslo and on his property Ekely. One segment, a panning shot in a park, includes a man and woman seated on a bench, echoing Munch’s 1904 painting Kissing Couples in the Park.
Edvard Munch: Kissing Couples in the Park (The Linde Frieze). Oil on canvas, 1904. Photo © Munchmuseet
The high-angle shot of the boys looking through a fence, as we watch them, points to the artist’s canny and humorous analysis of point of view. Munch’s fragmentary films share the experimental camerawork with the genre of “city symphony” films of the 1920s.
Se also: Experience Munch's photography in the digital exhibition The Experimental Self
A film enthusiast
Electrified by cinema, Munch had even announced his intention of opening his own movie house. The short sequences he shot both mirror popular cinema, such as the films of Charlie Chaplin, and explore the industrial aesthetic of Dziga Vertov’s silent documentary Man with a Movie Camera from 1929.
Munch shot his “home movies” in the summer of 1927 using a Pathé-Baby camera that he had purchased in Paris. The portable device, which had come on the market in 1922, had helped to spark a surge of amateur home movies all over the world. The 9.5 mm projector that accommodated the film, and which Munch also owned, was likewise inexpensive and marketed for home projection. “Every decade extends the influence of cinema, enlarges its domain and multiplies its applications,” stated the Pathé promotional literature, “ …Today, in order to enter our home, it has made itself small, simple, affordable.”
Munch’s camera had a spring-loaded drive, rather than a hand-driven crank, allowing for a uniform recording speed and simplifying his act of filming. His fascination with the effects of time and motion are played out with humor and deliberation in his few forays into motion pictures. The artist peering into his own lens is a performance knowingly looking at a self that will be projected later, an actor in his large body of self-images.
This text is based on writings from the digital exhibition The Experimental Self, which you can explore here.
