Like many of Peter Watkins' uncategorizable films, Edvard Munch testifies to the enormous creative potential of the British director's unorthodox methodology. Improvisational and collaborative by nature, Watkins' strategies contradict solipsistic notions about godly auteur figures who stamp their idiosyncrasies on every frame. Originally made in 1974 as a television film for Norway and Sweden's national networks and written with his largely amateur cast, Edvard Munch is a 166-minute-long biographical portrait of the Norwegian painter responsible for the recently stolen dorm-room-favourite known as The Scream.

Just as Munch pushed far beyond the innovations of the French Impressionists in order to portray a dark inner world that was as real to him as anything visible to the eye, Watkins rejected prosaic concepts of the documentary and the docudrama in order to capture what Werner Herzog calls "Ecstatic Truth." In Edvard Munch -- screening this week at Cinematheque Ontario in a restored 35mm print -- dialogue is often supplanted by Watkins' dispassionate narration, which includes data about Munch's life in Oslo (then Cristiania), thumbnail biographies of Munch's peers, excerpts from the painter's diaries and the vicious remarks of his many critics. Actors in period costume address the camera directly in the manner of TV interview subjects. A linear timeline is abandoned in order to link Munch's later experiences with formative traumas such as the deaths of his sister and mother and his heartbreak over an affair with a married woman. The details accrete like the layers of paint on Munch's canvases, though the painter expends nearly as much energy trying to scrape away the colours.

Watkins' initially confounding methods emerge as perhaps the only way to fully portray Munch's work as the product of both one man's individual sensibility and the wider influences of his age. As powerful, thoughtful and revelatory as anything you'll see this year, Edvard Munch stands with Victor Erice's The Dream of Light and Maurice Pialat's Van Gogh as one of a tiny number of films about artists that are themselves masterpieces.

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