Cinema: “Edward Munch” and Nordic cinema at UNAM

MEXICO CITY (process.com.mx).-

In collaboration with the embassies of Finland and Sweden and cultural institutions such as the Icelandic Film Center, the UNAM Film Library has organized a Nordic Film Festival that not only includes films from different cultures such as Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland and Greenland, but also from different periods.

In this event, which began on June 22 and concludes on June 2, 10 films have been selected that give an idea of ​​the richness of these cinematography.

Films like Pilgrims (Sweden, 1971), a classic by Jan Troell, a not so well-known director but on par with Ingmar Bergman, who is characterized more by his social concerns than his existential theme; an epic of survival that broke with the commonplaces of Hollywood cinema, starring Max von Sydow and Liv Ullman, a great opportunity to see this mythical couple of actors so familiar to Bergman admirers. Extraordinary adaptation of the novels by Vilhem Moberg for whom survival is impossible without a radical change of consciousness. Only comparable in quality and scope of the human spirit in the face of adversity to Masaki Kobayashi’s famous trilogy, The Human Condition (1959).

Opportunity, perhaps unique, to see the work of the experimental artist and famous singer – among other surprises – Anna Eriksson, W (2022), avant-garde work, sadomasochism sequences (not for all tastes), where perversion and horror contain a metaphorical background about Europe, relationships, loneliness and the dead end of current culture. The list of the other tapes, available to everyone on the Internet, is great, so go to the José Revueltas Room of the UNAM University Cultural Center.

From a personal point of view, Edvard Munch (Sweden/Norway, 1974) condenses not only the best of Nordic cinema but also the art and cultural legacy of the countries on the list of this exhibition; The direction of the British Peter Watkins proposes an inside look at one of the most complex modern painters in modern painting, known and reproduced endlessly; Paradoxically, even today, little understood. The cultural distance, the fact of not being Nordic, allows Watkins to fully immerse himself in the period, Munch’s family and personal drama, a glorious case of cultural appropriation.

Study of the painter’s creative process, personal, family and social biography, Edvard Munch represents an artistic feat, and perhaps no one has managed to condense the life of an individual with its historical, social and economic context as Watkins has done. Even in the best biographies of famous people, the staging of the setting and historical causes feel either artificial or just juxtaposed. Here the sequences and dramatizations of Munch’s life, the family and relational catastrophe, are supported by the narrative, voice-over by Watkins himself, and a kind of interviews, loaded with affection, which mentions social realities of the time, the exploitation of children at work, prostitution, marital relations, endemic tuberculosis, bourgeois art, in its worst conception, and censorship.

If there has been an authentic artist committed to the social cause and art, the furthest thing from the pamphlet, it has been Peter Watkins; Perhaps that is why he has neither teachers nor disciples because he has never compromised his expression, nor repeated his formulas. As a filmmaker he elevated the mockumentary technique, the mockumentary, to the category of art and space to give voice to characters crushed by history. In Edvard Munch the viewer experiences the substance of the painting, the artist’s strokes composed of sobs, despair, childhood scenes that suggest that no matter how personal they may have been, they are the result of the social and economic conditions of the time, as well as the repression, or the cost of sexual liberation, censorship and psychosis.