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.
Jonas Wergeland’s aim was to show how, at a certain point in her life, Liv Ullmann chose to become a woman, a person, who created reality — who was no longer content to be a ‘fiction’, a dream. One might say that she turned her back on worldly splendour. All the glamour of film stardom. She went from being out in front, to being behind. From being written about to writing herself. From acting to action. Liv Ullmann did not deny her past, what she did was to broaden her scope. She was an actress, but now she also became a writer and a human rights activist. It says something for Jonas Wergeland’s powers of intuition, that he also — unintentionally it’s true — anticipated her next step: her decision to become a film director.
The most laudable aspect of the programme was the way it focused so firmly on Liv Ullmann’s intelligence — which was also her biggest handicap as a so-called star, not least in Hollywood. What to do with such an actor, one with such rare gifts, such magical power? There were simply no scripts capable of embracing her, of allowing her to give of her best. As an individual she had too much breadth for the standard, formulaic American film roles.
In Jonas Wergeland’s version of events, when she got up and walked away from Henry Kissinger and round to the other side of the camera, Liv Ullmann was choosing to write her own part. To quite literally live up to her name which, in Norwegian, means ‘life’. The actress gave way to Liv, the woman. Fiction gave way to Life.
Thanks in large part to Jonas Wergeland, from an early age I regarded Liv Ullmann as an ideal. His programme about her was much in my mind when I left the world of television and made the leap from being seen to seeing. Creating. But right now, in Høyanger, I was going through a frustrated phase, I almost felt like rebelling against our own project. One evening, when Martin was doing his best to console me with one of his sumptuous club sandwiches, I began to delete stuff. Did we really have to say that Trotsky had once stayed at a hotel in Vadheim? What about all the foreign submarines that people claimed to have spotted in the fjord? In Sogndal I had paid a visit to a man who worked in a slaughterhouse. He had shown me a collection of things he had found in cows’ stomachs — not just nails and rocks, but an old Norwegian coin, the inner tube from a bike tyre and a gold wristwatch. It was funny, but was it relevant?
More and more often my thoughts returned to that disc which I had heard so much about, and which Jonas Wergeland told us even more about: the disc attached to the Voyager probes which, inconceivably many years from now, might pass other stars and planets. Some day — who knew — it might even be opened and played, analyzed, by beings from some distant galaxy. What would they think, if think was the right word, when they saw the picture of a snail’s shell, or the leaf of a strawberry plant? Of a dolphin or a banquet in China? What would they think when they heard, on this disc, the sound of wind and rain, of grasshoppers and frogs? Footsteps, heartbeats, laughter? Or, what could they possibly make of this: the sound of a kiss? I tried to imagine the reaction of an extra-terrestrial being on hearing a voice say in the Indian language Gujarati: ‘Greetings from a human being of the Earth. Please contact.’