It all began with Munch. Not the painter, but with the 1974 film about the painter Edvard Munch by the British director Peter Watkins. At first the influence was not so much cinematic as existential, because the film awakened in me a budding awareness of the artist figure as something other, and more, than merely a craftsman. Later, of course, the cinematic devices left their mark on me too: actors looking straight into the camera, interviews in the middle of the narrative, the break with illusion. Not to mention the amateur actors and the many dialects.