Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

In order to understand just what a crack-brained plan this was, one has to bear in mind what an exceptional antipathy to skiing Jonas had. One reason for this was Daniel’s excessive keenness for this very sport. Once or twice as a small boy Jonas had attempted to keep up with his brother on the many tough slopes leading up to Lilloseter: an experience which would appear to have satisfied his need for the taste of blood in his mouth and the feel of a string vest sticking to his back as he stood on a senseless finish line gasping for breath, with his whole body pulsating and his lungs feeling way too small.

So it says a lot about his achievement and even more about his red-hot infatuation that for several Sundays in succession he went for long runs along the ski trails of Lillomarka, despite being in very poor skiing form, to say the least of it. He staked all his hopes on running into her on the lot outside the main building at Sinober, possibly while she was engrossed in the inscrutable mysteries of ski waxing. Jonas was so besotted with Eva that he was quite sure luck would be on his side. Although in his frame of mind you did not think in terms of luck. You dealt in imperatives. She would be there — waiting almost — at Sinober. And how was he to make his entrance onto the lot? In this lay the very heart of his plan, the cunning detail designed to win her heart: he would come skimming in like a ski racer, or one of the elks of Lillomarka. At full speed and with a rime-coated face as proof of how fast he had been going.

This was a trick he had learned. If it was cold enough, and fortunately on those Sundays it was, he would pull up at the foot of the last slope before the café — having taken it nice and easy up to that point, while constantly looking over his shoulder, just in case she happened to be coming up behind him — and puff his breath up onto his face, building up a becoming layer of frost on his eyelashes, eyebrows and the edge of his woolly hat. And bearing this irrefutable evidence of breakneck speed he would sprint over the last rise and come swooshing onto the clearing in front of the café, hawking and spitting and panting just heavily enough.

Sadly, the one thing lacking was the key ingredient: Eva was conspicuous by her absence. That he received approving glances from other skiers every time he swept onto the lot decked with frost like a Lillomarka elk was of little comfort. No red anorak, no noble girl with strong fingers wrapped around a tub of ski wax or a mug of blackcurrant cordial. Sunday after Sunday Jonas stood at the foot of that last slope, breathing frost onto his eyebrows, and even he could see the funny side of it, see himself from the outside — this boy, puffing and blowing like some animals do when mating. But even this laughable bird’s eye view of the situation could not stop him; he was convinced that Eva would only deign to bestow her attention, a glance , on him, if she could see what a brilliant skier he was.

Sunday after Sunday Jonas went haring off into the forest; it occurred to him that these cross-country treks might be a sublimated form of anger, that here on the ski trail he had actually found a direction for his wrath: love. Sunday after Sunday, by dint of some hefty double poling — over the last stretch at least — he would skim onto the lot at Sinober which, in his mind, had gradually become a symbol of a crazed red haze, an infatuation which he found almost frightening. But Eva always seemed to be somewhere else in Nordmarka. So Jonas ascertained, with equal disbelief, every time; he did not see how she could not be there when he had strained every sinew, masked himself so magnificently, rime-encrusted eyelashes and all, and was so bone-wearily lovesick. He stood outside the Sinober lodge café, feeling trapped, possibly because he happened to be staring down at his ‘Rat-Trap’ ski bindings. But still he held to his belief that he would meet her there. And sometimes he would glance up and, for a split-second, see a mirage, a red anorak, and he would be as sure as ever again: next Sunday she would be there. He could already picture the look on her face: first amazement, then sincere delight and finally: her inevitable, reciprocated love.

In the meantime there was some consolation and distraction to be found in the orange glow of the darkroom, watching Leonard’s father forcing, as it were, negatives into something positive. From the very outset of their friendship Jonas had kept telling Leonard: ‘You should take up photography, too, you know. If you want to be any good, you need to get started right away.’ Jonas felt so strongly about this that on more than one occasion he actually thrust Olav Knutzen’s well-worn Rolleiflex at his chum, rather like a relay baton. Leonard never took it. He felt he ought to make it his aim to do something else. It was not enough merely to foster the gifts you had inherited — a pair of penetrating eyes; you also had to improve upon them. ‘I know where I’m going to start,’ he said one autumn. ‘With films. We should always surpass our fathers’ achievements.’ Leonard did not know how right he would prove to be.

Again: how could anyone fail to see it? When one considers everything that has been written about Jonas Wergeland’s ingenious and innovative television programmes, it is a mystery that no one has ever mentioned his passion for the most closely related of art forms.

The next couple of years were pretty hectic. After a little doctoring of their school ID cards — a crime of which not a few were guilty — Jonas Wergeland and Leonard Knutzen became in all probability the youngest ever members of Oslo Film Club. And if anyone got wise to their scam they never let on. Leonard was big for his age anyway, and Jonas masked himself as well as he could — if not with frost then with a moody expression. During the late sixties, every Saturday afternoon without fail they would go along to the Saga cinema, or sometimes the Scala, and take their seats together with people who viewed new Polish or Japanese films in utter silence, or sighed with pleasure at Orson Welles’s three-minute long, unbroken opening shot from Touch of Evil.

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.