“Peter Watkins’s Edvard Munch is the standard by which all subsequent films of artists’ lives will be measured. Rather than reducing its subject, Watkins’s film is the first to suggest the totality of factors producing an artist. Mixing fact and fiction, narration and ‘interviews’ [with figures in Munch's life and paintings] . . . Watkins fashions a gigantic collage of Munch and his time. Edvard Munch is a jagged, nearly overwhelming monument to a repressed, obsessive man whose life and art were a prophecy of the anxiety of the twentieth century” (Daniel Talbot, New Yorker Films).