"THE FREETHINKER was originally conceived under the title ‘August Strindberg’ as a full-length feature film which I was commissioned to make by the Swedish Film Institute and the Swedish TV in the late 1970s. The result, a four-and-a-half hour film entitled ‘The Freethinker’, is based on the original manuscript, with many new scenes and important facets developed by the students themselves, who researched, directed, filmed, recorded, edited, costumed and principally organized the production and funding of this major pedagogical project! Among many aspects of the high standard of work by these students, was their research into social conditions in Sweden during the 1870s. ‘The Freethinker’ endeavours to show: a) how non-orthodox filmic language forms can expand our view of history, and our way of relating to people on the screen, and to each other. b) that there are ways to produce audio-visual material other than according to the rigidly centralized methods used by the MAVM. c) that, contrary to what we see on TV, there are potentially alternative processes for viewers as well - through which they can become individual participants instead of hierarchically dominated, passive receivers". Peter Watkins

"EDVARD MUNCH is the most personal film I have ever made. Its genesis lies in a visit to the Edvard Munch Museum in Oslo, in 1968, during the time of a screening of several of my films by the Oslo University. I was awestruck by the strength of Munch’s canvases, especially those depicting the sad life of his family, and was very moved by the artist’s directness - with the people in his canvases looking straight at us. I also felt a personal affinity with his linking of past and present, e.g., in the large painting showing the anguish of his family as his sister Sophie is dying: the artist and his brothers and sisters are depicted as adults -as they were in the 1890s when he painted this scene - even though the event had taken place ca. 20 years earlier. On another occasion, I was also very moved by Munch’s masterpiece Death of a Child, hanging in the National Gallery in Oslo; in this painting the artist is broken, and has, in an almost desperate frenzy, blurred the form of his earlier depiction of Sophie’s death. This painting, in its time, was attacked as being “incomplete” - a charge which branded certain of his other works as well". Peter Watkins