Some aspects of his paintings such as the raised viewpoints, arbitrary cropping and distortions directly replicate what emerged when his photographs were developed. They fed too into his interest in multiples. Munch revisited motifs time and time again: he painted six versions of The Sick Child, seven of The Girls on the Bridge, 12 of The Vampire. His revisitings were not copies but reworkings, partly for commercial reasons but largely because he needed to return to the memories or episodes that had prompted them to refine and intensify them until some sort of catharsis had been attained. Of The Sick Child, which was first painted six years after the death of his sister Sophie, Munch wrote that there was no other painter "who had lived through his motif until the last cry of agony" as he had with this image. Returning to it over and over again was a way of recovering memory and sensation.

Other visual quirks came from moving film, especially after he bought himself a cine-camera in 1927. Strong diagonals and figures advancing towards the viewer feature in many of his pictures (The Scream is the prime example) and are directly attributable to the accelerated perspective of characters walking towards the lens in movie films. He also painted a series of dramatic pictures recording a brawl he had with a fellow artist, Ludwig Karsten, showing the pair of them, bloodied and tumbling down a slope, that could be stills from a fight scene in a film. 

Meanwhile, external experience was also responsible for the suffocatingly closed rooms, stagey lighting and frozen poses that were another artistic trait (Puberty and Weeping Woman) and which grew out of his friendship with August Strindberg and the set designs he made in Berlin in the 1890s for productions of Ibsen's Ghosts and Hedda Gabler. Dramatic real-life events such as a fire in a neighbouring house or a group of Communists being executed by firing squad in Finland also found their way into his  pictures.

Nevertheless, Munch's conviction that "the angels of fear, sorrow and death stood by my side since the day I was born" was the real motive force of his art. He was not exaggerating: both his mother and sister died of TB, another sister went insane, his brother died shortly after his wedding, while Munch himself was confined to a clinic after a nervous breakdown, and his great but fraught love affair with the heiress Tulla Larsen culminated in the painter being shot in the hand.

"I try to dissect souls," he wrote. The real importance of the modern age for him was not as a repository of fresh subjects but that it suggested new techniques through which to dissect his own soul and portray his "strange, noisome-terrible life".