When I got home from New York, it struck me that I could ask Joachim if he wanted to do it with me. He said he would like to, but he was working on a new film, they were in the pre-production phase now, they would be shooting it in autumn, and then he would be editing all winter and spring, so he didn’t really have time. But, he said, his brother Emil directed documentaries, maybe he could do it, and then Joachim could join us on some of the days we were filming?
* * *
*
About half a year later Emil and Joachim picked me up at Oslo Central Station, we were going to Villa Stenersen at Vinderen.
In the car they told me that their grandmother had studied art history in Oslo in the 1940s, and that she and the other art history students had been given the task of cleaning up at Ekely when Munch died. So she was there, amid all paintings and the prints, in the chaos he had left behind.
– Have you ever talked to her about it? I asked them.
– We’ve tried, Emil said. – But she doesn’t remember much any more. She’s old now.
– Would have been great to include it in the film, though. An eyewitness account. She doesn’t remember anything?
– Very little, I’m afraid.
According to Stenersen’s biography, Munch passed away quietly at around six in the evening of 23 January 1944. He had caught bronchitis before Christmas, when he had spent several hours sitting thinly dressed in the stairway after some big explosions downtown. A German ship had been blown up, explosives had also been set off on the docks, a couple of hundred people died. All the way up at Ekely windowpanes shattered, and his housekeeper had made him take cover, where he caught the bronchitis which eventually weakened him so much that his heart stopped beating about a month later.
According to Sue Prideaux’s biography, he was reading Dostoevsky’s The Possessed in bed on the final afternoon of his life. The funeral was hijacked by quislings, although his sister Inger tried to prevent this; photographs of the occasion show a coffin covered with swastikaed wreaths. Munch himself had rejected every attempt by the Germans to make contact with him; Stenersen tells a remarkable story about the time when Knut Hamsun’s son, the painter and writer Tore Hamsun, came to Ekely during the war to ask Munch to sit on an ‘honorary board for the arts’ together with his father, Christian Sinding and Gustav Vigeland. Stenersen gives the following account of the exchange between Tore Hamsun and Munch:
– You must accept membership on the board. My father is begging you – if, for no other reason, at least for the sake of old friendship.
– Old friendship? Is your father an old friend of mine?
– He speaks of you as the greatest painter of Scandinavia.
– Is that so? Does he have any of my pictures? That’s news to me. Which ones does he have?
Tore Hamsun blushed. Knut Hamsun had no pictures.
– Perhaps he can’t afford to buy any? Munch mocked.
The honorary board for the artists never materialised. Munch was unshakeable.12
It is difficult not to smile at this anecdote, especially if you know that Knut Hamsun was just as old, stubborn and wilful as Munch, and that they must have heaped curses on each other inwardly. Although they came from different social classes, Hamsun from the very bottom of society, Munch from the cultural elite, they had both had their breakthrough in the same city during the same time, with works that in similar ways represented a radical break with what had been, and both leaning on Dostoevsky. And both abandoned their early radical aesthetics and moved on to something else – Munch to a more traditionally observed painting, Hamsun to a more traditional narrative universe, both having absorbed vitalist impulses, the high point in Munch’s case being The Sun, painted in 1911, and on Hamsun’s part Growth of the Soil (1917). Munch’s pictures of fields, horses and labouring peasants express a yearning to belong not all that dissimilar to that of Hamsun from that time. World War II was the great divide, Hamsun sided with the Germans, Munch kept his distance, and while Munch died in 1944, Hamsun lived on until 1952 and before he died wrote his masterpiece On Overgrown Paths, which is about the daily life of an aged man at an old people’s home in Grimstad, where he has been interned pending the opening of his treason trial. The mood is not unlike that found in Munch’s final self-portraits in his rooms at Ekely. The old man alone with himself and his mind.
To read about Munch and Hamsun is to read about something from a remote and long-gone era, but when Emil and Joachim told me about their grandmother, that she had been at Ekely that spring cleaning up, it struck me that it wasn’t really that long ago. My parents were born the year Munch died, and the story my father told me, that he once saw Hamsun, might actually have been true, though it probably isn’t.
The paintings, prints, drawings, letters and papers which the Trier brothers’ grandmother helped to register are what now form the Munch Museum’s collection.
* * *
*
Surrounded by old wooden houses and gardens, Villa Stenersen looks like something from the distant past, although it was built in the late 1930s. The villa, which was designed by the architect Arne Korsmo and represents a high point in Norwegian functionalism, shone in the rain as we came driving up the hill, with its facade divided into squares of blue- and white-painted concrete and grooved glass, veranda, staircases and columns.
There are photographs of Munch here, in one of them he is standing very erect in the living room, wearing an overcoat and with his hat in one hand and his cane in the other, it is slightly out of focus, so the details of his face are vague, but the way he holds his head, pulled back a little so that it looks like he is viewing everything from above, is recognisable from the portraits he painted of himself, including the very first ones, when he was a teenager in Kristiania in the 1880s.
In another photo Stenersen himself is there, he is standing right behind Munch and smiling broadly, looking astonishingly young compared to Munch, whose face is in sharper focus here: high forehead, slightly sunken eyes, thin white hair and an open mouth which makes him look very aged. That too is recognisable from the self-portraits, both the one where he is sitting and eating cod at a table at Ekely, the one where he stands looking grim in front of the window with the snow-covered landscape outside, and the one where he is standing very erect in his bedroom, between a clock with no hands and a bed.
When we reached the same living room and were standing in the same spot where Munch had stood in the photograph, so many time levels met. We were as distant from the 1940s as Munch had been from his own youth when he was here. In the photos taken at the villa then there is also a kind of break in time, the straight, sober and minimalist surfaces of the rooms made all the Munch paintings hanging there look old-fashioned, like something from another world or another culture. The Dance of Life hung there, and Snow Landscape, Thüringen, Bathing Scene from Åsgårdstrand and Winter Night, along with many others.
This was the second time I had stood in a room where Munch had been. The first was the one where he was born, in December 1863, and now this, which was one of the last rooms he visited.
Between the impoverished nineteenth-century room and the extremely costly state-of-the-art modernist twentieth-century room lay his life and his paintings. And now another twist of the screw had been added, for the room was full of cameras, light and sound equipment belonging to the 2017 people making a film about him.
Joachim sat down in a chair in the middle of the floor, I sat in another, and one of the film crew snapped a clapperboard shut.
* * *
* * *
– Many of Munch’s paintings from the 1890s are about being shut out, or about shutting the world out, I said. – It is almost as if he developed a symbolism of gestures of exclusion, with all the bowed heads and averted faces. That is clearly a theme in your films too. I am thinking among others of the main character in Oslo, August 31st, who is either unable or unwilling
to receive anything from others.
– The first thing I want to say is that I feel a little embarrassed that you are asking me to compare myself with Munch. But let’s talk about it as an inspiration. And as a part of the unconscious cultural field surrounding Munch. When I am making a film, I often don’t understand quite what I’m doing until afterwards. What I realise then, is that the characters that interest me don’t feel like outsiders initially – they are allowed to come to the party, they are allowed to be a part of the family, they are given the opportunity to form friendships, to belong to a city, to a milieu. But they are unable to get close to others. They don’t know how to be among others. But they are among others. The Munch who is idealised in a lot of the biographical literature is the Munch who doesn’t want to be among others. But in his pictures I see an enormous longing to be allowed among others. And that longing, I have to admit when I look back at my films, it seems I have had myself.
– What is your relationship to Munch like?
– I began with the usual relationship to him that people who grow up in Norway develop. As a paradoxical figure whom we were told about, a master of sorts and an important national figure. At the same time, everything he stood for was very remote from what we faced in our daily lives, Norwegian values – for Norway isn’t necessarily a country that cultivates art and intellectual pursuits – and all the things we love about Munch, his courage and his differentness, in everyday life were considered peculiar and excluded. But it took a long time before I was able to see his pictures. I felt about Munch the way some people feel about the Beatles: that the music is so iconised in the place you grow up that you just can’t listen to it. You have to rediscover it. I did that with Munch via some of his woodcuts and lithographs, not through his paintings. I found the paintings too powerful, too garish. I thought it was all too much. I think I was afraid of his emotional honesty. In part it was also that when I was younger I was afraid of sentimentality.
– What was it that you were afraid of?
– I was primarily a film guy. Film is so mimetic, it is perhaps the most mimetic art form of all, and it is very easy to elicit emotion in a film. It’s very easy to take the obvious and squeeze an emotion out of it. In literature there is a kind of automatic distance and abstraction, through the fact that it is writing. When you write yourself closer to reality, at the same time you are writing yourself closer to a separate literary space. In film you create a physical and concrete space. A person who suffers, the classic theme, a victim, you feel sorry for them – and then you squeeze the feeling for all it is worth. It’s easy to do.
– Are you thinking of the manipulative side of it?
– Yes, the manipulation. That’s why I always saw it through that particular optic. At the same time I had a genuine wish to be allowed to talk about intimate things that felt real and that no one talked about. I do think the reason we make art is because something is missing, there’s a crack in the world, something or other isn’t there, something has to be filled in – a meaning that isn’t there. Which I am terrified will crush me. Maybe it sounds pretentious, but I think I’ve always been afraid of it. And then I look at Munch, who dares to speak in a personal and intimate idiom about the big things. Hegel talks about the universally specific. That you hit upon something so specific to you that it actually transcends you and reaches outwards. That’s what I feel Munch does. The loneliness, the inability to get close to others, watching the others dance, standing in the forest and peering out at them on a summer night. I find it beautiful and deeply moving. And then there’s the idea of mental spaces. That he actually creates a space I experience as being, almost concretely, a remembered space or a dreamed space. Which he dared to give form to. In an almost childish way, especially in the 1890s phase, the well-known stuff from the Frieze of Life, some of them are so shameless in their insistence that ‘I’m trying to find an essence here’. To be faced with that has been a great inspiration for me.
– What is it about Munch’s remembered spaces that interests you? Or memories in general; your films too are preoccupied with memory?
– Among my most powerful childhood experiences was the realisation that we remember. I remember sitting on a tricycle when I was in kindergarten, and I thought of that moment and decided to remember it for the rest of my life. I still remember it. And I think that the moment you become conscious of your memories, you also become conscious of transitoriness and identity. When I was four or five years old I began to realise that time passes, because I was able to remember what I experienced. If time passes and I have changed, that means that I can also cease to be. I can get to the end of time. For human beings are not eternal. Then death appears. Instantly, like a connection: if I can exist, and remember that I exist, I can also not exist. I began to think about it a lot. And ever since then I have been preoccupied with my memories. I romanticise the past tremendously. Because the past is a place where I’m in control. I can’t die there, because I survived. I was there, I remember it. And I know what the outcome was. I’m afraid of what is going to hit me, I’m afraid of what I don’t know, I’m afraid of the future. I have difficulty being present, being in the moment. But I manage it retrospectively. And I sometimes manage when I’m making something. When I’m shooting a film, I know that what I’m making will also exist outside myself. That it takes time: film and memory are linked as formats. Melancholy is also about memory, and about transitoriness. It’s mysterious to me, it is one of the things I care about most. Memories are identity, they are what we think of as ourselves.
– Transitoriness is really loss, and memory reconciles us to it. When someone dies, the issue of memory becomes acute in a whole new way. And uncertain. Your last film, Louder Than Bombs, plays out somewhere around there, in that territory. A mother kills herself, and you tell the stories of those who are left behind?
– I was interested in three men who were faced with the absence of the same woman. The husband feels wholly inadequate in relation to his children and to his wife, and he is unable to move on. When he meets another woman three years later, he can’t handle it, he doesn’t know what to do. The eldest son is unable to be a man in relation to his wife, he is unable to be a father to his child, and he is unable to acknowledge that maybe he didn’t really know his mother. He distances himself from her after she dies. And then there is the youngest brother, who may have understood more but who hasn’t been permitted to know, has been kept away by the others, but perhaps knows more than the others. As a child he is both more vulnerable and more malleable, he accepts time and experience in a different way. It is of course also about the things we idealise and then cannot move on from. Which is what happens when we lose someone. Very easily. The way Munch depicts the loss of both his mother and his sister Sophie is almost religious, almost erotic. You get a feeling of an incredible longing that is almost directly linked to the experience of new women, as transference. Which he then paints. His relation to woman as first an object of loss and then an object of desire, and the eternal rejection which he appears to stage in his paintings. In Vampire, is he being comforted or is he being killed? Is he being enclosed in something warm, or is he being removed from himself and life? Is she good, is she evil? Woman is an enormously complex entity in Munch’s work. And one of the things I have been struck by in his pictures, perhaps because I am interested in it myself, is precisely that. Too near or too distant in relationships. And then I’ve been interested in the relationship between the traumatic and the sublime.
– What do you mean by that?
– If one considers the sublime as something which appears but can neither be articulated nor reduced, and the traumatic as that which becomes fixed within us, and which we can never remember clearly because it is too complicated. I thought of that in regard to Munch, how he keeps dwelling on those portraits of grief, those moments of sorrow, and of the enormous love for his sister as she somehow fades away. It is almost graphic i
n his paintings, she fades away into brushstrokes which no longer have direction, only a kind of diffuseness. And you can also see how thoroughly he has worked around some of the people he loved, erasing and painting over again, there is this texturing in the paintings which is so full of nerve. You feel the process. But trying to say it is a struggle. Trying to remember. Which in itself tells you that it was something traumatic.
– You spoke earlier about being afraid of sentimentality. I suppose it also has to do with wanting to make something that is true? Something that isn’t manipulative or schematic. In Louder Than Bombs everyone in the family has particular roles, and everyone seems uncomfortable with them, they move in and out of them, not wholeheartedly, not as a result of a decision, it is more as if they are unable to do or be what is expected of them. They are between roles, in a way. That position reminds me of the act of making something, for then too one has a role, an expectation of how things should be. My thought is a simple one: that life really takes place between the forms, and that in order to get close to it, one has to get in between the forms that art has to offer. I am fairly certain that this was the problem Munch faced, not least when he painted his sister’s death: how to find a way into what is real without using the effects and methods of realism.
– For me one of the most important things when I make a film is to try to find a language that fits formally with exactly what I want to do. To use the possibilities of the film idiom to create mental images. How can one show thoughts on the screen? A very concrete example: when we wrote Louder Than Bombs, we had a trite and simple formal idea – someone hears someone else reading from a novel, and that becomes thoughts. We knew that the boy was in love with a girl at school, and that we were going to tell the viewer that he didn’t quite know what had happened to his mother. So we thought we could use that formal device, which is just cold and technical, and make it warm by putting it into play. We had written a literary pastiche, from something that might have been a novel, about someone who experiences the final moments of his life, and then we let the boy hear a girl reading it. He thinks about it, what the final moment of life is like, and then he wonders what his mother was thinking when she died, and the voice changes, he begins to think about how she died – was that how it happened? Maybe it happened like that, maybe not, he doesn’t know. But he wonders. Did she think of him? Then he enters his mother’s mind, and we cut in associations about what she may have been thinking of one time at the beach, for those are the kinds of moments we remember, with sand against our skin and wind – or did she think about me that time we were playing hide and seek? But wait, I was playing hide and seek there, she must have seen me the whole time! He discovers something about what his mother may have been thinking of him inside his memory, and before we know it, we are on the outside again, back in class. We have been on an internal journey, where I have tried, in a banal way, to create inner images, an inner stream of memories and thoughts. And in that stream an oedipal connection surfaces, which I didn’t see at the time but understood later, between Melanie, whom he is in love with, and his dead mother. And it is true, in fact, that is what it’s like to be a human being. But it’s not something you can plan for, you have to stumble your way into it. That is exciting to me, using the film idiom to try to create montages like that. Many are opposed to it, they consider it unfilmic – they think film is about grand images giving form to situations. André Bazin, the great film theorist, says that one should be able to choose where to look, and that therein lies the humanism in film. One shouldn’t force montage and manipulation upon the viewer. To me, that scepticism is comparable to being sceptical of sentimentality. Both result in a narrow space in which to feel and think. That form, which many film-makers call construed or strained or manipulative, is one I like to experiment with, and to me that’s OK as long as you use it to get somewhere that is emotionally open.
So Much Longing in So Little Space Page 16