He didn’t say a word about any of this when he returned to the campfire and his parents, with his trousers caked in muck. ‘Poor Jonas — looks like he’s seen a wood nymph,’ said Chairman Moen, handing him a sausage wrapped in a slice of bread. Jonas sat down next to his mother, felt his hand trembling slightly as he took the cup of orange juice she poured for him.
It remained his secret, that spring day and that sight. Little did Jonas know what it would lead to. In any case, and thanks to the silver brooch, the ball of snakes seemed not so much frightening as precious. Jonas remembered it as a pattern, thought of it as a treasure. A jewel deep in the ground. A living jewel. Something swirling round and round, almost hypnotic.
Sonja and the Stars
It wasn’t that Jonas Wergeland forgot that spring day in the forest, but it would be a long time before he could, so to speak, learn from it. To show you what I mean, allow me to remind you of the programme on Sonja Henie, one of the twenty-odd chapters in that masterpiece, Thinking Big, Jonas Wergeland’s epic television series on Norwegians who had won themselves a place in the world consciousness, whose names were bywords, rich in associations, in the international vocabulary.
Jonas Wergeland not only scored the highest viewer ratings ever recorded in Norway, he also, and much more importantly, achieved the highest viewer intensity. Expectations were always great, so to begin with — until they were won over, that is — people were a little disappointed with his portrait of Sonja Henie. The programme contained no facile, sarcastic remarks about her father, the colourful and ambitious Wilhelm Henie, said nothing about those three incredible Olympic Golds, the ten world championships, the crowds at the Eastern Railway Station and the Royal Wharf when she came home to Oslo, nothing about her ‘Heil Hitler’ salute to the Führer and her refusal to help Little Norway at the start of the war, nothing about Tyrone Power, nothing about the triumphant ice show at the Jordal Amfi Arena, nothing about two broken marriages, expensive mink coats, flamboyant jewellery, problems with alcohol, not so much as a word about the fashionable house on Hollywood’s Delfern Drive and the parties held there, with swans carved out of blocks of ice in the swimming-pool and orchids flown in from Hawaii. Jonas Wergeland produced an all but silent programme, a programme that focused, basically, on just one thing: skating. With skating as dance, as acrobatics, as — yes, beauty. It was a scintillating ice-blue programme. ‘It sent shivers down my spine like some eerie, yet beautiful, sight,’ as one reader’s letter put it. And in case you have not guessed, Professor, this too has a bearing, of course, on the inconceivable factor round which we keep circling: a dead wife.
Originally, Jonas Wergeland had intended to build the key scene around a training session at Frogner Stadium, but instead he decided to set this scene — a fictitious one, naturally — on a tarn, a little lake in the forest, where the atmosphere was that much more magical. The camera captured an image of a clear winter’s night with stars reflected on the glassy blue ice. Jonas commenced with a close-up of the skates, showing how forlorn they looked — a pair of battered skates, abandoned on the ice. Then he showed them being slipped onto two feet, the laces tied, and the transformation, as if they had been invested with spirit, before — steel blades flashing — they exploded into a series of turns, inscribing, as if by magic, an enormous ‘S’ on the ice. The camera focused tightly on the legs the whole time, on the skates, on the blade slicing through the ice, etching out markings, figures, exercises from the world of the compulsory programme: Mohawks, reverse Mohawks and double Mohawks, snaking curves and loops. The camera pulled up to reveal that the tarn was a circle upon which Sonja’s dancing had etched flourishes and arabesques, an exquisite pattern; carved a gigantic, glittering brooch out of the very countryside of Norway.
This programme had a strikingly erotic feel to it, distinctly at odds with the image of the girl with the baby-doll face. For the close-ups of the finer techniques of figure skating, they used the top female figure skater in Norway at that time. But the actress Ella Strand, who played all of the series’ heroines, also did her bit, in a wig which bore a passing resemblance to Sonja’s blonde curls, and with her own natural hint of a snub nose — as luck would have it she had done figure skating herself as a girl, and still retained some of her old skill. Jonas had no scruples about making the most of her womanly silhouette, the line of her bust and her long legs, got her to wear a simple, tight-fitting dress with a short skirt — one of Sonja’s many revolutionary innovations, as it happens. The camera dwelt on a woman spinning around, ardent and intent, dwelt on her thighs, almost caressing them, caught — with something close to awe — the suppleness that transmitted itself to the blade of the skate and made the ice fly up.
This was the programme’s key scene: Sonja on the little tarn, alone, in a wintry Norwegian forest, alone with her skates and the stars, executing a high-speed dance across a mirror-like expanse of ice. Jonas highlighted the physical nature of figure skating, the stamina it craved, by running the sequence without music, by amplifying the sound of the skates cutting through the ice, and that of Sonja’s heavy breathing. With an adoring camera, Jonas Wergeland managed to convey the difficulty and beauty of, and the effort involved in, some of the figures from those days, for example the execution of three figure of eights in succession in such a way that it looked like just one. It was Sonja alone on the ice, encircled by snow-laden pine trees, skipping, gliding, swooping, in the midst of a strange display, like a rite, the blade of the skate etching figures in the ice, heavy breathing and the swish of swift swirling movement. ‘Talk about an undertow,’ was the cameraman’s comment.
A lot has been said about Jonas Wergeland’s intelligent filming — before that earth-shattering scandal, that is — about a producer who finally took people’s intellect seriously. What rubbish! The truth is that Jonas Wergeland understood, better than anyone else, that television was first and foremost based on emotions, on the irrational. Jonas Wergeland knew that you conquered a nation not by appealing to its reason but by bombarding its senses. Which meant that you had to simplify. And the challenge, as he saw it, lay in coming up with the best, the most surprising form of simplification, the one which could, to greatest effect, reduce even a complex life to a few essential and comprehensible figures that could be etched out in a flurry of ice, like a figure of eight on a frozen lake: simple and yet infinitely fascinating.
For this reason Jonas Wergeland built his programme on Sonja Henie primarily around the techniques of figure skating and, in the first sequence, on the jumps in particular: the axels, the lutzes and the split jumps, soaring leaps rendered even more impressive by the lowering of the camera as Sonja took off. Over and over again. Almost dauntingly simple. And therefore so entrancing. Many viewers claimed to have experienced a feeling of weightlessness; and perhaps that, when you get right down to it, is what figure skating is all about: becoming weightless, suspending gravity, soaring up to the stars.