Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

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 seen, 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.