Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

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.

And then one spring, as if the one thing led quite naturally to the next, they attended a seminar on Italian film held at the Film Institute in the Oslo suburb of Røa. If they had been looking for something to ‘believe in’ and were expecting it to appear on the silver screen, then this was their epiphany. Their introduction to Michelangelo.

They took their seats in the cinema expecting more neo-realism, instead they were presented with something quite different. On that weekend at Røa they saw four films in all by the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni: L’Avventura, La Notte, L’Éclisse and The Red Desert . They were shocked, outraged almost. His scenes reminded them of the stupid, stylised illustrated serials in weekly magazines. Was such a thing possible? They saw figures walking in different directions, one in the foreground, one in the background. The pace was so slow that they had to stifle a yawn. The close-up of a face could be held for ages. Occasionally characters would move out of shot, but the shot, the empty scene, would be held, long. Antonioni did not seem to have any intention of telling them a story. His characters did not do anything, they acted no parts. They looked . As if none of them could make sense of the world in which they found themselves. Jonas and Leonard understood little of it, and even less of what the thinking behind the films might be. They kept wanting to get up and leave, but they never did. Jonas suddenly realised that he had found a kindred spirit, someone who was out to show them that the world was flat.

On the train back into town they sat staring out of the window. Was it possible? To make a film which ended not with a man and woman meeting as they had arranged, and as everyone expected, but with a seven-minute long sequence in which the audience saw nothing but dull scenes from somewhere in a city. And yet: over the next few days, every now and again either Jonas or Leonard would suddenly exclaim: ‘Claudia! Anna!’ in that typical, exaggerated Italian accent. Or, with anguished expression: ‘Perchè? Perchè? Perchè?’ And they knew that they had been sucked into that universe. Or it had taken up residence inside them.

As to the search for some direction for their anger, its future looked precarious. Instead of sneering at the deplorable state of the world, they were more liable to spend an hour discussing Monica Vitti’s bone structure and the broad bridge of her nose: part lioness, part porn model. Her lips. The way she made up her eyes. One Saturday at the Grand café, after the Film Club, Leonard announced — apropos the power of the Italian tradition — that all philosophy, all questions, including that of Monica Vitti, boiled down to the subject of Raphael’s fresco The School of Athens , the contrast between Plato pointing upward and Aristotle pointing forward. One pointing to heaven, the other to the world. ‘So which way would you choose?’ Jonas asked. Leonard reached a hand into the air, pointing upward. Jonas thought that was his answer. ‘Two coffees,’ Leonard said when the waiter came over. ‘And two marzipan cakes, since there seems to be a shocking want of tiramisù around here.’

Things started to become rather hazy. They did not do much except wander around, looking. Without any idea of what they were looking for. When not eating spaghetti with a carbonara sauce, or possibly a processed cheese and walnut sauce, down there in the basement, in that red laboratory, or darkroom, in which they had originally planned, by dint of experimentation, to figure out what to do with their lives, to develop images of possible plans of attack, they sat and vacillated. And not only that: they doubted. For the moment at least, Leonard seemed more interested in wielding the pepper grinder — Jonas would never forget the sound of that utensil — than in getting hold of a camera. But he succeeded in justifying his vacillation. ‘I wander around absorbing impressions,’ Leonard said, expertly twirling spaghetti round the base of his spoon with his fork. He was gearing up for his career as Norway’s greatest film director. He was honing his eye.

And his role model, or honing steel, was Michelangelo — Antonioni, that is. They discussed his films. The flagpoles in L’Éclisse , the church bells in L’Avventura , the humming radio masts in The Red Desert . They marvelled at the way in which Antonioni reduced everything to flat planes, even using a telephoto lens to compress the depth of the image. It surprised them to find how well they could remember whole scenes, seemingly meaningless snippets of dialogue. The long sequence on the island in L’Avventura had made a particularly strong impact on them: all those people wandering around on their own, tiny figures cutting this way and that across the deserted landscape, looking for Anna, the lost girl. While Jonas regarded Antonioni as a kindred spirit, mainly because his films seemed to be all thought rather than action, for Leonard he was a mentor. He almost wept with rage when a guy at the Film Club told them that Antonioni had been forced to work in a bank for a while. A bank! Leonard, with a father working for the left-wing press and a mother in the Trade Union building, considered this the most degrading of all occupations. ‘A bank! You’d be better working for the Society of the Blind.’

At long last Leonard decided that his eye was sharp enough. From one day to the next he started calling himself Leonardo — since the Christian names of all the great Italian film-makers ended in ‘o’: Vittorio, Roberto, Federico, Luchino, Pier Paolo, Bernardo. The time had come for him to make his own films, to found ‘the Italian school’ in Grorud. While other boys received Tandberg tape-recorders or gold watches as confirmation gifts, Leonard was able to show off a fabulous 8 mm cine camera, complete with projector and splicer. And he was hooked. He became as fanatical about his camera as Jimi Hendrix — a fellow outsider — was about his guitar. Word had it that Hendrix slung on his instrument as soon as he got up in the morning; he fried bacon with his guitar hanging at his back and took it to the toilet with him. Likewise, everywhere Leonard went his camera went too. He also started wearing sunglasses, whatever the weather: with black frames, like the ones worn by Marcello Mastroianni in La dolce vita . Later, during his years at high school, his style of dress also changed. While Jonas stuck, during the cold months of the year, to his duffle coat, Leonard went around with a heavy coat swinging from his shoulders like a cape and a scarf which he never tied, but simply draped over the coat. No Afghan coat for Leonard. ‘There goes an intellectual,’ his attire said. Or rather: ‘There goes a film director. A Leonardo.’

Jonas was press-ganged into a brief but intense career as an actor in various enigmatic films, or more correctly: disjointed scenes played out in and around Grorud. On one occasion he had to get up at the crack of dawn to sit stock-still in front of the lovely glass rotunda by the ornamental pond in the middle of the shopping centre. Not a soul around. Nothing but an ethereal light. Buildings on three sides. Clear geometric shapes and long shadows. A touch of the Giorgio de Chiricos. ‘Look straight up into the air,’ Leonard shouted as he circled with the little camera. ‘Think of something … deep.’ After shooting four rolls of three-minute film he was satisfied. ‘Superb,’ he said. ‘What were you thinking about? You had a face like a dream machine.’