Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

I think it must also have been this love which enabled him to view his country in a new and unprejudiced light. ‘You have the Ganges,’ I heard him say to Kamala — in jest, I grant you — on the way to Høyanger, as we were leaning on the rail, gazing incredulously at Ortnevik across the water, ‘but we have Sognefjord. This is our sacred river. And the farms clinging to the mountainsides are our temples.’

With similar pride he showed us the church at Høyanger, designed by no less a person than Arnstein Arneberg, one of the architects behind Oslo Rådhus. The old town gate offered a perfect view of it, in its lovely setting on the other side of the river, on a low hill at the foot of Gråberget’s steep rock face. Jonas talked Kamala and I into posing on the bridge, so he could take our picture with the church in the background. It might have had something to do with his closeness to Kamala, but sometimes I had the impression that he was starting to look like an Indian, even in his colouring, that soon he really would look like a film director from Bombay — just as his grandmother’s features had, over the years, grown more and more Churchillian. He took a long time over it, snapping picture after picture, until eventually Kamala got fed up, went up to him, took the camera and ordered him to go and stand next to me. That was so like her. Kamala Varma is a woman who prefers to take photographs herself.

This same attitude, or mindset, lay at the root of Wergeland’s programme on Liv Ullmann. Jonas’s heroes and heroines were not only discoverers, they were to just as great an extent rebels. Few have discerned the salute to the spirit of resistance and defiance which underpins the whole series.

At the heart of the Ullmann programme lay an incident which many Norwegians recall with ambivalent wonder: the actress’s dinner with Henry Kissinger in March 1973; a banquet which was duly covered by a couple of Norwegian dailies. Jonas Wergeland concentrated, however, on their brief meeting before the dinner, which was by no means an intimate affair, but a huge party in honour of film director John Ford, held at the Grand Ballroom of the Beverley Hilton Hotel; a function also attended by President Nixon. A lot of Norwegians felt very proud, flattered even, on Liv Ullmann’s behalf, that Henry Kissinger himself, long-time professor of political science at Harvard University, now the presidential advisor on national security and soon to become the American Secretary of State — not to mention something of a womaniser and one of the world’s most written-about men — had personally asked the Norwegian actress to be his dinner companion. But a lot of Norwegians were also rather shocked, and possibly disappointed, that an artist of Liv Ullmann’s weighty calibre should allow herself to be dazzled by something as basic, not to say primitive, as power, and such a dubious sort of power at that; they did not like the thought that she might fall for a man who, while famed for his brilliant analyses of foreign affairs and inspired diplomacy, was equally well-known for his cynical, almost sinister internal intrigues, and was even quoted as having said — the nerve of it! — that power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. Many people found it hard to equate the couple’s little tête-à-tête with their image of Liv Ullmann as a demure woman with a natural Nordic allure. She was accused of being naive. The possibility that she might have accepted the invitation with her eyes wide open, that she might be a mature woman with masses of self-confidence and great inner strength was almost automatically discounted. This was the politicised Norway of the seventies, readily inclined to think in terms of headlines such as: ‘Sweet, innocent woman seduced by nasty, conservative man.’

As an actress, Liv Ullmann was at the very peak of her career, nominated for an Oscar for her role in The Emigrants . But despite her international success, despite all the prizes and honorary degrees bestowed on her from all quarters, despite being the subject of a lead story in Time the year before, with her picture on the cover and all, Liv Ullmann’s acting was not particularly well appreciated in Norway. In people’s minds she was always associated with a certain type of ‘heavy’, doleful role, with a tremulous expression and a voice which was all too easily parodied.

Jonas Wergeland wanted to shatter the stereotype ‘Ullmann myth’ which prevailed in Norway. In the programme’s key scene the couple, Liv Ullmann and Henry Kissinger, were seen having a glass of white wine in Ullmann’s Hollywood hotel suite — there was no sign of the secret service people, nor of the friend who was visiting Liv Ullmann at the time. It was Kissinger, ever the diplomat, who had requested this brief meeting, so that they could have a little chat, just the two of them, before leaving for the society dinner in honour of John Ford. Jonas Wergeland portrayed them as actors in a film. He had Ullmann, or rather: Ella Strand who played Ullmann, dressed, not in the white gown which the actress had actually been wearing, but in a red number with a plunging neckline, the one which she had worn in the unforgettable mirror scene, an almost two-minute long close-up — what a piece of acting, what presence, it was enough to make a cameraman forget all about his camera — from the film Cries and Whispers — a film in which, incidentally, Liv Ullmann’s radiance and beauty were presented in such timeless and touching fashion that not only Henry Kissinger, but even your ordinary Norwegian had to take his hat off to her.

Then something occurred in this half-unreal film scenario, in which a Norwegian woman, a Norwegian maiden — people forgot that she already had two long-term relationships behind her — sat face to face with the worldspirit, to use a rather Hegelian turn of phrase. What followed, though quiet and undramatic, was in fact, a variation on the final scene from A Doll’s House — it was no coincidence that Nora was one of Liv Ullmann’s great roles — and in order to get this across Wergeland played Ullmann’s strongest cards: her face, her sensitive mouth and, above all, her eyes, that look, the secret of which lay not in their blueness, but in the strength of will that shone in them. Liv Ullmann would later write a book entitled Changing, an international bestseller and a life-changing read for many people. Jonas Wergeland set out to capture just such a moment of change. A moment marked by the urge to object, to do something other than what is expected. In an earlier version — of which he even did a trial cut — at the turning point of the Kissinger tableau he inserted Ullmann’s primal scream from Ingmar Bergman’s film Face to Face , as a cry of realisation or protest; a brief clip from the scene in which, in the part of Jenny, she stands with her back to a wall and screams, really howls. Instead, though, he opted for the quieter transition, partly because he wanted to break with the unfair Ullmann cliché of a face contorted by psychotic angst and pain. Suddenly, while sitting there in that hotel suite with Kissinger, she lifted her eyes, that expressive face, and looked out of the ‘fiction’, out of the scene, straight at the cameraman, as if she had caught sight of something extremely important, then she abruptly stood up and walked towards the viewers, giving them to understand that she was taking over the camera, the direction, herself; her voice was heard, giving instructions, as another actress entered the scene, dressed in the same red dress and sat down in her, Liv Ullmann’s, place, across from Henry Kissinger. With this switching of roles, Jonas Wergeland also wished to show how detached Ullmann actually was from the whole carry-on — and from the gossip and the ridiculous rumours to which she knew it would give rise. She took, as it happens, the same rather blithe approach to a later dinner held to mark the end of the SALT negotiations, at which she was seated between Kissinger and the Soviet ambassador to Washington. For Ullmann, this function had about it the inescapable air of a superficial, inconsequential party game or a first-night shindig. The way she saw it, Kissinger would have made the perfect tragic figure in a Bergman film. And so at this pivotal moment, in this fictional situation, when Ullmann got to her feet and stepped out of Kissinger’s dazzling aura, it was with a cool, little smile for which Jonas found justification in her little known sense of humour and self-irony. And by some inexplicable metamorphosis, the woman on the screen, the slightly younger actress who had taken Ullmann’s place, now called to mind Kristin Lavransdatter, while Kissinger suddenly looked like Erlend. A note of defiance had crept into the scene, a sense of a secret rendezvous between a woman going against her parents’ wishes and an excommunicated man. Viewers were witness to a provocative flouting of convention. A passionate woman who stayed true to her convictions, had faith in her own judgement of right and wrong. A woman who was no longer just a good little girl who listened to what everyone else told her she should do. A woman who was also — no small point this — stronger than the man sitting opposite her.