To paraphrase the title of a classic 1960s jazz album: It’s Munch’s time. On Sunday, the Museum of Modern Art unveiled the first American retrospective in three decades, and another 25 prints are on view at Scandinavia House. His most famous work, “The Scream,” is in the news for having been stolen (for the second time), and the alleged thieves are on trial. Today, New Yorker Video releases a DVD of Peter Watkins’s rarely seen, brilliantly innovative film “Edvard Munch” (1976). Does this mean it’s also Mr. Watkins’s time? We can only hope.

The DVD comes with a verbose copyright warning and “self-interview” by Mr. Watkins in which he defends himself against accusations of paranoia and repetition in terms that are likely to spur those very charges. Specifically, he protests the marginalization of his work, and who can deny the justice of his claim? His films don’t incite controversy but rather the kind of suppression kept so quiet that no one bothers to protest the protest. He isn’t listed in leading directories of film directors, fellow Brit David Thompson found no room for him in his biographical dictionary, and critics sympathetic to his lefty politics seem to have ignored him. Even Leonard Maltin’s movie guide ignores all but two of his films (“Edvard Munch” didn’t make the cut).This isn’t marginalization; it’s blackout.

I had never seen any films by Mr. Watkins until last fall, when New Yorker released the astonishing political thriller “Punishment Park,” which in 1971 played 10 days in San Francisco and four in New York before the distributor withdrew it amid a hail of critical abuse. A reworking of “The Most Dangerous Game,” “Punishment Park” is a howl of outrage in which illegally interred dissenters and hippies can choose between decades in prison or two days as quarry for military hunters. If they survive, they go home; if not, they go the way of habeas corpus. Acted by amateurs and shot with the sham objectivity of a documentary, “Punishment Park” endures as a painfully truthful reflection of that era and parable for this one.

Mr. Watkins’s initial reception in the United States had been far more hopeful. After the BBC refused to broadcast his 1965 analysis of nuclear devastation,”The War Game,”that film crossed the ocean to win a best-documentary Academy Award. Having burned bridges in two English-speaking countries, he moved his operation to Scandinavia, where he earned the ire of Norwegian television with his original 3 1/2-hour cut of “Edvard Munch.”It’s not hard to see why.

One of the most probing dissections of an artist ever attempted on film,”Edvard Munch” is every bit as severe and political as “Punishment Park,” framing the artist as an indefatigable visionary trying to illuminate the lives of those who prefer the dark. In Mr. Watkins’s portrait, Munch isn’t merely a radical expressionist, defying representational dicta to divulge brittle feelings of terror, longing, jealousy, sorrow, dread, guilt, and love. He is an incendiary, violating “people’s tastes,” undermining society’s binding conventions, threatening the livelihood of painters whose work repre sents the image a nation wishes to see in the mirror. Every passionate stroke of Munch’s brush, pencil, or knife – and there has never been an art film with so much driven brushwork – is a wound in the faith of those who “don’t talk about things like that.”

Although his film is no more a documentary than “Lust for Life” or “Moulin Rouge,” Mr.Watkins combines nonfiction techniques with a Bressonian asceticism and trust in amateur actors. “Edvard Munch” tracks only the years of Munch’s main artistic breakthroughs (1884-95), but within the context of recurring childhood traumas.

These are not explanatory flashbacks of the kind running amok in recent biopics.They are integrated glimpses of the past woven into a narrative mosaic, and they have the effect of flattening perspective, as Munch did on canvas. Mr. Watkins complains of the strictures of what he calls “monoform” filmmaking, but he is not above creating a dramatic spine and sticking to it – in this instance, Munch’s frustrated love for a married woman, Millie or, as he called her in his journals, Mrs. Heiberg.

The story is told through two narrations: the rather priggish voice of authority, recounting history, and that of Munch,taken from his writings.Not unlike the painter, who combined oils, pencil,charcoal,and every other means at his disposal in attacking a canvas, Mr. Watkins employs sundry techniques, including fades to black, objectivity (“the person on the left is …”), time capsules (“Goring is born, Tchaikovsky dies”), improvisation, mock interviews, handheld photography, zooms, and especially close-ups and extreme close-ups. Visually, the film is spellbinding. The warm, faded colors have a painterly precision that underscores the verisimilitude achieved by cast, costumes, and setting.

The actors, 200 amateurs who heeded a casting call, may hit false notes for those fluent in Norwegian, but none that are otherwise detectable. Geir Westby’s resemblance to Munch counterpoises the use of Munch’s self-portraits. Mr. Watkins likes his actors to occasionally glance directly at the camera, which he thinks breaks down the fourth wall; Mr. Westby’s sullen stare eerily matches the incisive straight-ahead poses of the paintings. The director protects the integrity of Mr. Westby’s performance by giving him little dialogue; he is often seen walking or sitting in crowded cafes or confronting a canvas. In his verbal confrontations with Mrs. Heiberg or his father, he is photographed from the side or from behind.

Two other memorable performers are Gros Fraas as Millie, her mature beauty, sexual superiority, and radiant smile justifying Munch’s besotted distrust; and Kare Stormark as Hans Jaeger, the troubled spokesman for free love and bohemian truth-telling – the first of several cafe pundits who serve to liberate Munch from the fundamentalist piety of his father.

Much of the film is concerned with the oppression of women and the chimera of free love. Jaeger – bearded, pockmarked, arrogant – expansively entertains his minions with talk of masturbation, women’s rights, and adultery, but as women take up the challenge, the men are driven crazy. Mr.Watkins focuses on a few women, married but with growing portfolios of lovers, who justify themselves in interviews, indifferent to the whining complaints of men and as stubbornly independent as Dreyer’s Gertrude. One of Munch’s paintings depicts a woman kissing the nape of a man’s neck, an image the film sets up as crucial to Munch’s infatuation with Mrs. Heiberg. The writer Stanislav Przybyszawski (who pimps his wife to prove his tolerance) renames it “The Vampire,” a title Munch lets stand.

Most of the film’s women suck the marrow from possessive lovers or die as unmarried spinsters. An exception is Munch’s 15-year-old sister, who died of tuberculosis, a recurring refrain in the film, leading to its great set piece, the 1885 painting of “The Sick Child,” which Mr. Watkins explicates in electrifying detail. It is Munch’s first statement of his brand of expressionism, which is at once objectively representational and emotionally unbound. By the time he finishes it, the viewer is all but implicated in its creation, making the critical onslaught all the more appalling.

Although the film delivers on the artist’s growth and triumph, it is strangely ungenerous in dealing with his other work. “The Scream” is never once shown in its entirety – we see close-ups of the bloody sky and skeletal face, but not the body, bridge, or water. Similarly, “Anxiety” is described, not shown; Munch’s portraits of Jaeger are not even mentioned.Little is seen of the continuity in the paintings that make up the “Frieze of Life.” Similarly, the film is so intent on showcasing maundering philistines, and the critical fury Munch faces at one exhibition after another, that it discloses little of Oslo’s eventual capitulation to Munch, and no sense whatsoever of the riches and adoration he enjoyed for much of his life.

Yet to complain that the film ignores this or fudges that is to fall into the trap that the faux-documentary invites.”Edvard Munch” is Peter Watkins’s portrait of the artist. It situates him in a time of rampant disease and unrestricted child labor, in a family beset by death and insanity, in a world on the cusp of undefined liberation and easily tormented by cultural originality. A happy ending would have denied the truth of the struggle. The triumph of this remarkable film is that it indulges Munch’s despair without succumbing to it.

Mr. Giddins’s column appears every second Tuesday in The New York Sun.