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.
And apropos those two budding rebels in the Red Room, when it came to a keen-honed eye Thor Heyerdahl was the perfect role model for them. When he looked at a map of the world he did not, as others did, see the continents as being separated from one another. Instead, he saw the oceans as linking them to one another. And he saw that the Earth was round, even though the scientific reality was flat. Not least, Heyerdahl understood the importance of the ocean currents, and advanced heretical theories on migrations across the Pacific Ocean. What if the islands of Polynesia had been discovered by voyagers from the east? What if someone in ancient times had managed to sail from Peru to Polynesia? All of the figures in Jonas Wergeland’s television series were discoverers: Ibsen with his monocled eye, Foyn with his long telescope, Skrefsrud with his laryngoscope — a linguistic magnifying glass, if you like. And Heyerdahl with his eye for connections. Columbus may have discovered the sea route to America, but it was Heyerdahl who discovered the next stage, as it were, of that sea route, who showed that the world was one continuous realm; that for thousands of years the possibilities had existed for contact between different cultures, despite the great distances between them.
Scornful experts — unwittingly displaying the sort of glaring ignorance so often found among so-called scholars — dismissed any likelihood of a prehistoric voyage from South America. For one thing, they were positive the raft would absorb so much water that it would sink after two weeks. So in order to prove them wrong Heyerdahl set out on just such a journey, on a craft similar to the one which he believed these early seafarers had used. The Kon-Tiki expedition was, first and foremost, an undertaking which Heyerdahl felt compelled to carry out in order to make people take his hypotheses seriously. Thor Heyerdal’s voyage on those nine balsa logs lashed together was part of an attempt to prove a fact. But instead he gave birth to a piece of fiction. Jonas Wergeland did not know what Heyerdahl himself felt about this paradox, whether he would have regretted having underestimated the way in which such a sail would appeal to people’s imaginations, but in Jonas’s book it was a far greater achievement to star in a modern-day odyssey than to prove a scientific theory. Heyerdahl could write fat treatises till he was blue in the face. In the mind of the world he would always be the Kon-Tiki man. That was why Jonas Wergeland presented the whole programme from the angle of the Kon-Tiki film, of Heyerdahl as a film director. In Jonas’s eyes, it was the film which had made Heyerdahl who he was.
After just twenty minutes’ instruction in a camera shop in Oslo, amateur photographer Thor Heyerdahl used his 16 mm camera for the first time to film the building of the raft at the Callao naval yard outside of Lima. The US government had given them a supply of film, but when they went to collect their equipment at the customs in Peru they found that most of the colour film had been stolen. A lot of film would also be ruined at sea by the dampness and the heat. So there are no interior shots of the raft, no scenes showing Heyerdahl writing in his diary or Bengt Danielsson with his feet up, reading one of the seventy-three sociological and ethnographical works which he had brought with him. But Heyerdahl captured a lot of other stuff on film: flying fish on the deck, huge whales rolling on the surface, the crew hauling dolphins aboard. He filmed members of the expedition cooking, measuring the height of the sun with a sextant, playing guitar, dipping a pen in the ink from an octopus. Shots of the raft taken from a distance — which Heyerdahl obtained by rowing recklessly far out in the little rubber dinghy — turned out particularly well. He went on using the camera until everyone had been picked up from Raroia, the atoll on which they foundered after sailing and drifting 8,000 kilometres across the Pacific Ocean. By which time he had, almost symbolically, shot as many thousand feet of film.
Heyerdahl wanted to try and sell the film, so he had it developed in New York. Useless, said the people from Paramount and RKO after the first showing of the unedited footage, or extracts from it. Besides having been shot at the wrong speed the film was a mass of flashes and flickering, a hodgepodge of images: pelicans taking off, waves washing over the deck, a floundering fish, close-ups of the sail, of a man’s legs, a snake mackerel, a face, clouds. And shark heads from every conceivable angle. Only occasionally were there longer scenes in which something actually happened. Viewing the uncut film, for hour after hour, was a genuinely disheartening experience, even for Thor Heyerdahl; these disjointed fragments were pretty much the very opposite of the great unified whole, the existence of which he was trying to prove.
The one detail above all others which Jonas Wergeland chose to pluck out of Thor Heyerdahl’s eventful life, the moment he decided to blow up, was Heyerdahl’s decision to cut and edit a 16 mm version of the film himself. In a scientific cliffhanger to rival the search for the structure of the DNA molecule, the programme showed how for days Heyerdahl and his assistants worked round the clock in a hotel room in New York, cutting the hopeless raw footage down to just over an hour of film. In sequences that were as jerky and chaotic as the uncut film, Jonas Wergeland showed Heyerdahl looking and looking, searching for scenes which could be cut out and spliced together. There were close-ups of flickering countdowns, of the splicer, of eyes and frantic fingers. Long, monotonous shots of food being prepared or crew members manning the rudder were cut up into a lot of shorter clips — shots of Lolita the parrot in particular were slotted in at regular intervals; they alternated between wide shots taken from the top of the mast and close-ups, they switched back and forth between depictions of everyday tasks and more dramatic scenes, such as the visit from the whales and yet more shark-fishing, sheer action drama. The scene depicting the expedition’s final and most alarming moment — the collision with the deadly coral reef — was little short of a masterpiece, with an effective cut to the telegraph operator, ostensibly sending a last report on their position, though this was in actual fact a shot from a totally different stage of the voyage. This, Jonas Wergeland told the viewers, was Thor Heyerdahl’s greatest achievement: a cut-and-paste Kon-Tiki expedition; days and nights spent in a hotel room, editing a jumbled, unusable mass of images into a film which captured the interest of the whole world by saying something about what a single, inspired individual could accomplish.