Jonas started going to the cinema more often, on his own too, not knowing that this interest would one day lead him to the foremost university in England. He was very soon convinced: the motion picture had to be the highest form of art created by man. Nothing had ever spoken to him as strongly as this. Through the photographs in Aktuell and the many films he would eventually see, he discovered man’s weakness for illusion. Because even though, when he took his seat in the cinema and saw with his own two eyes that the stretch of canvas hanging above the stage was flat – as flat as the world, he was struck every time by the unimaginable depths which this two-dimensional panel acquired as soon as the house lights went down and the stream of images was projected onto the screen. He realised that he had underestimated his inherent capacity for embellishing upon the story, investing the magnified pictures on the flat surface in front of him with thoughts and dreams.
This may go some way to explaining why, in the television series Thinking Big, he very surprisingly and, in the eyes of some, most provocatively, chose film as the angle from which to address Thor Heyerdahl’s achievements and the significance of his work. True, Jonas Wergeland concentrated on the Kon-Tiki – but not on the expedition as such. The whole, absolutely all, of the programme on Heyerdahl dealt with Kon-Tiki the film.
It is often said that people today do not really believe that something has happened, in real life that is, until they see it on television.
Thor Heyerdahl’s stroke of genius lay in the fact that he actually foresaw the advent of this way of thinking only two years after the end of World War II, when he embarked on the Kon-Tiki expedition: possibly the most famous of all bold Norwegian expeditions. With him he took not only food and drink, he also had a cine camera. In our own day this has become the first commandment for all journeys of this nature; even solo expeditioners to the North Pole make sure to film themselves while, one is tempted to say, freezing to death or being eaten by polar bears. Jonas Wergeland’s programme on Heyerdahl rested on the thesis that the documentary film on the Kon-Tiki voyage, and a crudely shot film at that, constituted a greater feat than the voyage itself.
And apropos those two budding rebels in the Red Room, when it came to a keen-honed eye Thor Heyerdahl was the perfect role model for them. When he looked at a map of the world he did not, as others did, see the continents as being separated from one another. Instead, he saw the oceans as linking them to one another. And he saw that the Earth was round, even though the scientific reality was flat. Not least, Heyerdahl understood the importance of the ocean currents, and advanced heretical theories on migrations across the Pacific Ocean. What if the islands of Polynesia had been discovered by voyagers from the east? What if someone in ancient times had managed to sail from Peru to Polynesia? All of the figures in Jonas Wergeland’s television series were discoverers: Ibsen with his monocled eye, Foyn with his long telescope, Skrefsrud with his laryngoscope – a linguistic magnifying glass, if you like. And Heyerdahl with his eye for connections. Columbus may have discovered the sea route to America, but it was Heyerdahl who discovered the next stage, as it were, of that sea route, who showed that the world was one continuous realm; that for thousands of years the possibilities had existed for contact between different cultures, despite the great distances between them.
Scornful experts – unwittingly displaying the sort of glaring ignorance so often found among so-called scholars – dismissed any likelihood of a prehistoric voyage from South America. For one thing, they were positive the raft would absorb so much water that it would sink after two weeks. So in order to prove them wrong Heyerdahl set out on just such a journey, on a craft similar to the one which he believed these early seafarers had used. The Kon-Tiki expedition was, first and foremost, an undertaking which Heyerdahl felt compelled to carry out in order to make people take his hypotheses seriously. Thor Heyerdal’s voyage on those nine balsa logs lashed together was part of an attempt to prove a fact. But instead he gave birth to a piece of fiction. Jonas Wergeland did not know what Heyerdahl himself felt about this paradox, whether he would have regretted having underestimated the way in which such a sail would appeal to people’s imaginations, but in Jonas’s book it was a far greater achievement to star in a modern-day odyssey than to prove a scientific theory. Heyerdahl could write fat treatises till he was blue in the face. In the mind of the world he would always be the Kon-Tiki man. That was why Jonas Wergeland presented the whole programme from the angle of the Kon-Tiki film, of Heyerdahl as a film director. In Jonas’s eyes, it was the film which had made Heyerdahl who he was.
After just twenty minutes’ instruction in a camera shop in Oslo, amateur photographer Thor Heyerdahl used his 16 mm camera for the first time to film the building of the raft at the Callao naval yard outside of Lima. The US government had given them a supply of film, but when they went to collect their equipment at the customs in Peru they found that most of the colour film had been stolen. A lot of film would also be ruined at sea by the dampness and the heat. So there are no interior shots of the raft, no scenes showing Heyerdahl writing in his diary or Bengt Danielsson with his feet up, reading one of the seventy-three sociological and ethnographical works which he had brought with him. But Heyerdahl captured a lot of other stuff on film: flying fish on the deck, huge whales rolling on the surface, the crew hauling dolphins aboard. He filmed members of the expedition cooking, measuring the height of the sun with a sextant, playing guitar, dipping a pen in the ink from an octopus. Shots of the raft taken from a distance – which Heyerdahl obtained by rowing recklessly far out in the little rubber dinghy – turned out particularly well. He went on using the camera until everyone had been picked up from Raroia, the atoll on which they foundered after sailing and drifting 8,000 kilometres across the Pacific Ocean. By which time he had, almost symbolically, shot as many thousand feet of film.
Heyerdahl wanted to try and sell the film, so he had it developed in New York. Useless, said the people from Paramount and RKO after the first showing of the unedited footage, or extracts from it. Besides having been shot at the wrong speed the film was a mass of flashes and flickering, a hodgepodge of images: pelicans taking off, waves washing over the deck, a floundering fish, close-ups of the sail, of a man’s legs, a snake mackerel, a face, clouds. And shark heads from every conceivable angle. Only occasionally were there longer scenes in which something actually happened. Viewing the uncut film, for hour after hour, was a genuinely disheartening experience, even for Thor Heyerdahl; these disjointed fragments were pretty much the very opposite of the great unified whole, the existence of which he was trying to prove.
The one detail above all others which Jonas Wergeland chose to pluck out of Thor Heyerdahl’s eventful life, the moment he decided to blow up, was Heyerdahl’s decision to cut and edit a 16 mm version of the film himself. In a scientific cliffhanger to rival the search for the structure of the DNA molecule, the programme showed how for days Heyerdahl and his assistants worked round the clock in a hotel room in New York, cutting the hopeless raw footage down to just over an hour of film. In sequences that were as jerky and chaotic as the uncut film, Jonas Wergeland showed Heyerdahl looking and looking, searching for scenes which could be cut out and spliced together. There were close-ups of flickering countdowns, of the splicer, of eyes and frantic fingers. Long, monotonous shots of food being prepared or crew members manning the rudder were cut up into a lot of shorter clips – shots of Lolita the parrot in particular were slotted in at regular intervals; they alternated between wide shots taken from the top of the mast and close-ups, they switched back and forth between depictions of everyday tasks and more dramatic scenes, such as the visit from the whales and yet more shark-fishing, sheer action drama. The scene depicting the expedition’s final and most alarming moment – the collision with the deadly coral reef – was little short of a masterpiece, with an effective cut to the telegraph operator, ostensibly sending a last report on their position, though this was in actual fact a shot from a totally different sta
ge of the voyage. This, Jonas Wergeland told the viewers, was Thor Heyerdahl’s greatest achievement: a cut-and-paste Kon-Tiki expedition; days and nights spent in a hotel room, editing a jumbled, unusable mass of images into a film which captured the interest of the whole world by saying something about what a single, inspired individual could accomplish.
Through this, Wergeland also managed to say something about the importance of the montage technique. Even for a scientist like Thor Heyerdahl. In the hands of a skilled editor uninteresting material can be rendered fascinating. And to some extent that was what Heyerdahl did: wove information together in a new way. The pieces were all there, but no one had ever put them together before. Heyerdahl combined arguments from archaeology and ethnology, folklore and religious research, botany and zoology, linguistics and physical anthropology. But he also took account of the Polynesians’ own legends, discoveries from ancient times and natural phenomena such as winds and ocean currents. There was, he said, a need for a new kind of science, with researchers from different fields working together, building, assembling.
The big test, a moment every bit as crucial as that when the raft had to force Raroia’s jagged reef, came with the talk and the presentation of the cine film at the Explorers’ Club on an autumn day in 1947. This was the Kon-Tiki film’s real world premiere. Half an hour beforehand Heyerdahl was still gluing the strips of film together. During the showing he received the first sign of what was to come: the fairy-tale ending. Because, just as with a good story the less one embroiders upon it the more likely it is to appeal to the imagination, so too with this simple and technically flawed film. No matter how colourless and wavery the pictures may be, in their minds, people will blow them up. The greyer, the better. The flatter, the deeper. It was a huge success. The audience went wild.
Thanks to a couple of exceptionally committed and technically proficient Swedes, foremost among them Olle Nordemar, it was later possible to re-edit the original film from the lecture at the Explorers’ Club to the point where, on 13 January 1950, Kon-Tiki could have its cinema premiere in Stockholm. And, although the contribution made by the Swedes – not least in improving on the editing – must not be forgotten, this was, and still is, the proudest day in Norwegian film history. The Kon-Tiki went on to crown its voyage by bringing home an Oscar to Norway – the country’s first, and for a very long time only, Academy Award. Some might say that Heyerdahl’s book has also played its part in fixing the story of the Kon-Tiki in the mind of the world, but in doing so they forget that the film, in due course also the televised version, has reached half a billion people. It was a film which had an effect on people. Cinemagoers felt as though they were actually on the raft. There are reports of people feeling seasick and having to be helped out by the usherettes. The film even evoked personal associations for Jonas Wergeland when he saw it again while working on the programme. His thoughts went to a traumatic sail across Oslo fjord in a gale.
Thor Heyerdahl presented a bold new theory on the origins of the Polynesians. Here was a Norwegian who truly dared to think big. He set out, quite simply, to rewrite the history of mankind. And, of course, the inevitable happened. The expedition’s one hundred and one days out on the Pacific Ocean, the main purpose of which had been to document the validity of a fat treatise, became a thrilling tale of adventure, straight out of the Arabian Nights. Heyerdahl was acclaimed as the author of a brilliant manuscript. In Britain the film was compared to the tales of Jules Verne and Joseph Conrad. The Americans cited myths shaped by such novels as Robinson Crusoe and Moby Dick. Thus – very subtly – Wergeland showed Kon-Tiki to be an archetypal Norwegian film. Its message was that Norwegians were a seafaring people, and that they had always had a tendency to turn science into an adventure, a heroic exploit. Jonas Wergeland could never quite rid himself of the thought that there were certain parallels between Heyerdahl’s film and Heyerdahl’s theories. That just as he had made an enthralling film out of his poor raw material, so his provocative theories were built upon very shaky foundations.
Be that as it may, Jonas Wergeland found it hard to imagine any greater feat: to win an Oscar, in the USA itself, a country where the competition to attain such dreams is so fierce. In the scene where Jonas himself made his appearance in the Heyerdahl programme, this was the point which he highlighted. When you walked into the Kon-Tiki Museum on the island of Bygdoy, Wergeland said, the first thing one should look at was not the raft, but the glass case containing the Oscar statuette. This was the museum’s main attraction. It was this figurine, 33.5 cm in height and four kilos in weight, made from zinc and copper and covered with a layer of ten-carat gold, which spoke of the truly great deed. And it could also be said to symbolise Heyerdahl’s life-long dealings with statues great and small.
Through his television series, Jonas Wergeland showed that it was not just in sport that a country like Norway could make its mark in the world, despite what many young Norwegians – like Daniel – had been brought up to believe. You could win gold in the arts. Because Heyerdahl did not win his gold, his Oscar, for a sporting achievement – though some would reduce it to such – but for his vision, his idea. As far as Jonas Wergeland was concerned, that statuette was worth more than all the Olympic and World Championship golds ever won by Norway.
There was also the odd Oscar winner among the films seen by Jonas and Leonard as members of the Oslo Film Club. But primed as they were by their hotheaded sessions in the Red Room, with its library of old Aktuell magazines, it took them only a few months to discover their first love. As the son of a ‘reporter with a camera’ with the working-class press, Leonard felt sure that he was destined to fall for Italian neo-realism, films which – for all their differences one from another – testified to a strong social conscience, and often had a documentary element to them. But even Jonas, who had no real concept of Italy or ‘the Eternal City’ other than that formed by the garish postcards he had received as a small boy from his Uncle Lauritz the SAS pilot, felt strangely drawn to such films as The Earth Trembles, The Bicycle Thieves and Rome, Open City.
It was only natural that this interest should have an influence on their appetite, their palates suddenly seeming to yearn for flavours to match what they saw on the cinema screen. The basement – which in the Knutzen family’s more frugal past had housed a lodger – also contained a makeshift kitchenette with a cooker and a small fridge, and this proved to be all that was needed for Leonard’s culinary experiments, his flights into the realms of Italian cuisine.
Leonard was, however, a realist; he confined his endeavours to one dish. They had of course heard of such wonders as minestrone soup and pizza, but when they dreamt of Italy they thought, first and last, of spaghetti. If one were to compare, as we did earlier, their seething wrathfulness and lack of a cause to sitting empty-handed and devoid of ideas next to a pot of boiling water, then at last they had found something to put into the pot: pasta. It goes without saying, when one considers the time and the place, that they did not go so far as to purchase professional utensils or try their hand at more exacting and fiddly variations such as ravioli or tortellini. Leonard concentrated solely on the different sauces, and soon confirmed that these were not limited to ketchup and the dry-fried chunks of minced beef which his mother sprinkled over spaghetti on the rare occasions when she happened to make it for dinner. All it took was something as simple as a knob of butter and some toasted poppy seeds for Jonas and Leonard to feel they were partaking of their pasta several hundred miles further south.
Leonard took it very seriously. He could not get his hands on the uncooked herb-based sauce, pesto, but he did things in that spartan kitchenette in the Red Room which had never been attempted in Grorud before – not even in the swish Golden Elephant restaurant. It was here, for example, that Jonas first saw someone make a tomato sauce from scratch. Otherwise, just about everything went into Leonard’s sauces, not least into his bolognese; Jonas never did find out what he threw into the pot, but his friend was a sight to be s
een, standing over the simmering stew, sampling it, then promptly grating some nutmeg into it, as a finishing touch which, nonetheless, spelled the difference between lip-smacking success and inedible fiasco. At the peak of his culinary career he actually grew basil on the windowsill. As a grown man, Jonas would dine at critically acclaimed trattorie in Florence and Genoa, but he never tasted a pasta sauce as good as the ones which Leonard Knutzen dished up in a modest kitchenette in Grorud.
Leonard received a lot of help from his father. During the long summer season, when Youngstorget abounded in fresh vegetables, Olav brought home the finest fresh produce. There was, however, one problem: a want of parmesan, and even worse, of olive oil – remember, this was Norway in the 1960s, in gastronomic terms a Third World country. Luckily Leonard eventually discovered Oluf Lorentzen’s treasure-chest of a shop on Karl Johans gate, where not only did they have that essential piquant cheese, they also had an olive oil which, to his delight, was called Dante. And garlic, of course. Jonas and Leonard were probably the first people in Grorud to smell of this plant. And who knows, this may even have been a stronger indication of their outsider position than an obsession with Italian films. To reek of garlic would have been regarded by lots of people in those days as a more radical sign of wrath than an upraised fist in a black glove.
The food spurred them on to even more enthusiastic discussions of the Italian cinema. It almost seemed as if it was the spaghetti itself which made it so easy to talk vociferously and gesticulate wildly, vehemently brandishing one’s fork while yelling pointed remarks at one another. ‘I’m telling you, it’s the low budget that makes Rossellini’s editing so bloody brilliant!’ Leonard declared. ‘Better a back street in Naples any day, than all of Griffith’s phony studio sets and daft cardboard elephants!’ cried Jonas. They became more hot-blooded, a strange new temperament awoke within them. One of the things they liked best was to mop up the last of the sauce with chunks of the white bread. At such moments they seemed about to break, quite spontaneously, into Italian.
The Discoverer Page 27