Munch's “screaming” pain made by the cinema

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the painters began to pour their inner travails on the canvas. Of course, it had always happened, perhaps since the man invented the brush, but never with such disruptive and horror, and never so aesthetically indecipherable and therefore fascinating. From Treccani: “Expressionism (SM): artistic movement developed in Germany with the intention of contrasting the impressionist vision, an art of pure intimate expression, a screen in which the suffering of inner life is projected”. For this reason, expressionistic works tend to present cryptic, distorted, exasperated forms. Among the most excruciating screams of pain was that, launched by Norway, of Edvard Muncha painter who would have shown the ability to cross the currents in his career but who, precisely, in the early years of the last century he established himself as one of the most authoritative representatives of the new pictorial style that had passed through the Jutland peninsula from the Teisula, arriving up to Scandinavia. Munch He exercised a great influence on art coeval and subsequent, therefore also on cinema, starting from the German expressionist and north-European expressionist.

The inner world was a world in the world, and its “discovery” in the artistic sphere fruited the birth of new aesthetic codes. Obviously a strong impulse to the exploration of this intimate dimension gave it the birth of psychoanalysis thanks to the studies of Sigmund Freud on the unconscious, on the dream and on sexuality. Works like The interpretation of dreams, Psychopathology of everyday life And Three essays on sexual life One of the most influential figures of contemporary thought were revolutionary and made the Austrian doctor and philosopher.

More or less in those same early years of the twentieth century, a new medium was affirmed which would soon enter the list of fine arts: cinema, which initially drew legitimacy precisely by the aforementioned expressionist pictorial current, then the most stylistically considered (futurism was an avant -garde movement and still snubbed by critics). It was almost natural that seventh art and expressionism converged, finally coming into contact. One of the first film genres, if not the first ever to net of the protocinematographic experiments of Georges Méliès, was precisely the expressionist one of the 1920s, which in the tetra and disillusioned Weimar Republic, as was called the militarily defeat and geopolitically humiliated Germany of the first post -war period, found fertile ground. Dr. Caligari's cabinet (1920) by Robert Wiene e Nosferatu the vampire (1922) by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau were probably the brightest (obviously not in a literal sense) examples of the genre, but also Fritz Lang contributed with masterpieces like Metropolis (1927) e M-the monster of Düsseldorf (1931), his first sound feature film that a couple of years after his release would have been strongly opposed by the then nascent Nazi regime together with other works of the filmmaker, who for the aversion suffered finally decided to emigrate to the United States like many other exponents of German culture. The same Nazi aversion touched a Munchwhich in 1937 was made the object, together with other artists held as degenerated, of an exhibition aimed at putting his art in a bad light.

In this primary phase of cinema, the influence of the Norwegian painter, in turn formed literally with the works with a strong horror-psychological vein of the US writer Edgar Allan Poeit was evident. Many of the expressionist films are now considered relating to the horror film, where fear, psychology and distorted forms were also the main stylistic figures of the artist born in a town at a hundred kilometers from Christiania (the old name of Oslo). Several subjects of his paintings, moreover, left few doubts: vampire women, skeletons, people with deformed, defaced features, in the same way as hominids that came from another dimension. All testimonies of a tormented psychological nature and a macabre vision of the world also due to the youth trauma suffered (the mother and older sister of the artist died of tuberculosis when he had five and fourteen years respectively; his father became affected by maniac-depressive syndrome and another sister of his psychic crisis). Munch He would then have written: “I inherited two of the most frightening enemies of humanity: the heritage of consumption and madness”.

Just after the end of the Second World War, it was Alfred Hitchcock To cinematographically explore the ravines of the human psyche by investigating the dream sphere in his film I will save you (original title: Spellbound) released in October 1945. The film with Ingrid Bergman And Gregory Peck It was in all respects the first focused on the theme of psychoanalysis and on the study of the human mind. Taken from the novel The House of Dr. Edwardes by Francis Beeding was defined by the director himself “a manhunt in a pseudo-psychology envelope” and for the dreamlike sequences, he made use of none other than graphic creations by the Catalan artist Salvador Dalì. Thriller and psychology were moreover well represented by Munch In paintings like Death at the helm (1895), in which on the bow of the fishing of the fisherman in the foreground he sits a carcass to represent death, or Vampirealso work presented in 1895 and also known as Love and pain In which a woman is portrayed sitting in the act of consolating, but more likely, as induced to think the title, to bite on the neck, a man crouched on his legs. Not to mention the very famous The scream (1893), a title given to a series of disagreeing paintings and engravings on an image that has become a real pop icon. From the obviously autobiographical revolts, it represents in the foreground, against the background of a “smoothie” and almost apocalyptic panorama, a terrified and screaming ectoplasmic subject, in fact, that to issue his cry compresses his head with his hands, becoming almost prey to his own feeling. The man has guessed features and features, snakes, does not seem human but the projection of his own anguish, which is a symbol of collective, universal fear and pain.

Then came another Bergman, IngmarSwedish director of the same name but not a relative of the aforementioned actress, to represent the meanders of the mind on the big screen. The cinema of Bergman It is notoriously a cinema with strong psychological implications. In The place of strawberries (1954) The protagonist, an elderly professor of medicine, makes a real and metaphysical journey finding himself immersed in the mental projection of his past, reliving shadows and failures, and finally tracing a bitter balance of his life. His stylistic debt with the classics and in particular with the same expressionist genre of the 1920s, Bergman He welded him by interpreting the professor to a Swedish cinema giant, Victor Sjostrom, who in 1921 had directed and interpreted another milestone of expressionism, The ghost cartwhere once again the horror, represented by means of contrasts of light, anonymous angles and superimpressions, recalled projections of the mind as happened in Munch's paintings. The impossibility of understanding the unknown represented by the post-life is a Topos Bergman-Aia as evidenced by even the most emblematic among the scenes of the filmmaker, that, the famous one of the chess game of the protagonist Max von Sydow with death in person The seventh seal (1957). But it is the whole work of Bergman, a work as said by the often introspective and macabre implications, to be partially renovated. In certain placid and sunny, albeit solitary, Swedish marine banks that often act as scenarios in its films such as in the aforementioned The seventh seal, As in a mirror And Personechoes the Scandinavian desolation of certain “coast” paintings of Norwegian as Evening. Meloncholy, Despair, Seascape, North beach And The scream same (which is actually set in a hilly landscape by many often confused with a maritime). Betrayal is also a theme on which the work of Bergman and that of Munch find common ground: the first by facing it for example in Fanny and Alexander And The unfaithfulfilms he wrote for the direction of Liv Ullmann; the second by painting it in its famous cycle Jealousycomposed in a life and came to count eleven versions of the same subject.

Since the 1960s, the psychological theme began to be increasingly present in literature and cinema, which is why Munch's legacy was gradually diluted in the set of a thousand other references. By now we could no longer speak of the artist's direct influence, even if some credit had to be recognized, nor in terms of Nouvelle vague nor of Hollywood, where the vein probably was born with the masterpiece of Roman Polanski Rosemary's baby. Later in time, not even the filmography of a master of the psychological thriller like David Lynch It could have been directly traced back to Munch.

However, a director who returned to make a tribute to the artist manifest, partly on the media wave of the famous first theft immediately from The scream at the National Gallery of Oslo in 1994, it was Wes Cravenfor which the mixture of horror and psychology was the figure of the entire career. The mask of Ghostfacethe serial killer protagonist of his series of films Screamthe first of which was released in the cinema in 1996, was declaredly inspired by the aforementioned shouting of the picture, even if the theme of horror as the intimate fruit of the world of dreams had already been fully faced by the filmmaker in Nightmare. A nightmare After all, life had been for Munchwho after having coexisted for a large part of his life with his inner demons, in the last years of his existence, spent in his property near Oslo, had to live with the fear that the Nazi regime, which in 1940 had invaded Norway, could seize all his works. The artist would not have made time to attend Hitler's defeat and the consequent liberation of his country, and in this sense his death, which took place in 1943, was yet another bad shot reserved for him by fate.

Finally, to close these few lines of retrospective on the link between Munch and Cinema, the excellent is reported Docufilm Munch. Loves, ghosts and vampire womenreleased in 2022 At the same time, it is also a journey through Norway, in search of the roots and identity of a universal artist.