But what I have presented here is really only a pale outline of the programme, and I ought at the very least to say that it did also contain other elements, the most telling of these being a shot that cut from the scene by the Volga, from a close-up of Nansen’s eyes, to a scene with him as a young man sitting hunched over a microscope, studying nerve fibres: this too a voyage of discovery of sorts, inasmuch as the hunt for the axons and cells of the nervous system led out into the great unknown, with the aim, as he himself put it, of discovering the wellspring of thought, the hidden secret of life. To Jonas Wergeland, this nervous system represented the very key to Nansen’s life, so much so that Jonas tended to construe his journey across Greenland on skis as an expedition by Nansen into his own emotional life, and Nansen’s oceanographic surveys, particularly those relating to the currents, as an attempt to chart the central nervous system of the ocean. Jonas Wergeland also made much of the image of the young curator of zoology, newly returned from a crucial visit to Italy where he had learned various scientific processes, including how to dye preparations, studying the nervous system of invertebrates under the microscope — a study which was to bear fruit in his controversial and only belatedly acclaimed thesis The Structure and Combination of the Histological Elements of the Central Nervous System, which showed, among other things, how the nerve fibres split to form a ‘T’-shape having once penetrated to the innermost root of the spinal cord. A smooth crosscut between the Volga scene and this laboratory scene was achieved by dissolving the shot of the nerve fibres under the microscope into that of the starving mass of humanity.
In every programme in the Thinking Big series, Jonas Wergeland focussed on one prop, one detail which epitomized some vital characteristic of the hero in question. In Ole Bull’s case, it was the diamond set into his violin bow; with Fritjof Nansen it was the microscope — and positively not the sextant.
The most audacious feature of this programme, however, and one which only the experts and those with a particular interest in the subject picked up on, were certain technical experiments. One of these concerned the Northern Lights which are not, of course, found in the Ukraine but which were in fact the aurora borealis, as Nansen himself had so often described them: drifting, shifting clouds of light, a silvery, iridescent haze, shimmering ripples and tongues of flame expanding and contracting in a restless chase across the firmament before melting away with what sounded like ‘the sigh of a departing spirit’. Jonas Wergeland’s team had filmed actual Northern Lights with a special-effects camera, using time-lapse photography to make the action more dramatic. Then, in the lab, with the aid of an optical printer and masking, they had projected this onto the sky above a weeping Nansen. In this way the Northern Lights were likened to nerve fibres which caused the whole sequence to vibrate or, if you like, the shimmering sky to become the image of Fridtjof Nansen’s inner being.
The other special effect had to do with the sound of pack ice. Nansen was fascinated by the devastating power of the ice. The way he depicted it, it began with a thunderous roar, like a distant earthquake, after which it started to screech and snap all around you, and the ice cracked and shot up on all sides, with a boom like cannon-fire. The audio team endeavoured to create this particular sound by mixing synthesized creaking noises with sound effects, i.e. real sounds, from crushed ice: the sound you get when you drop fresh ice-cubes into a glass of water, those little cracking noises. This sound of pack ice was exactly what Jonas Wergeland was looking for in the scene in which Nansen stands there weeping with the Northern Lights flaring across the sky; gradually they increased it in volume until many viewers actually felt as if they were being squeezed. Some said later that they had squirmed in their armchairs, others that a long shudder ran down their spine, the sort induced by someone running a fingernail across a blackboard. Whatever else they may have felt, the majority were struck, in the scene in which Nansen stood on that steppe beneath a sky scintillating with Northern Lights, weeping before a group of mothers and their starving children, by a sense of primitive forces at work, a sense that something was about to split wide open, to be crushed and dragged under. Those viewers who could not see that the Fram was there in that programme were quite simply lacking in imagination.
So the programme on Fridtjof Nansen also had to do with cold and ice — not least in human terms, with a global spirit that was sick unto death, as Nansen said in the speech he made on being presented with the Nobel Prize — a fact which Jonas Wergeland intimated most strikingly by concluding the programme with a close-up of Nansen’s eyes, showing the tears frozen to the skin.
A Cut to the Eye
There they were, on board the old lifeboat, renamed the Norge, where Gabriel Sand was now talking about acting, ‘the least understood of all the creative arts’. He demonstrated, for example, after fixing his eyes on the deck for thirty seconds, how he could turn on the tears and when Jonas looked impressed he said: ‘It’s you who sees the weeping and the emotion; all I do is squeeze out a couple of tears.’
As if to underline this illusion, or the air of magic, he lit a cigarette and was soon wreathed in coils of smoke which took on an unwonted movement and dimension in the light of the paraffin lamp. ‘So what do you plan to do after high school?’ he asked.
‘Study architecture,’ said Jonas, not really knowing why, although he had an idea that the urge to do so dated back to walks around Oslo as a boy, when there were certain buildings which he never tired of seeing: the Town Hall in all its massive symmetry and the Art Centre with its so-called ‘golden mean’, but more than anything else, due to the fact that his father often took him down to the harbour to look at the boats, there was Lars Backer’s exquisite Restaurant Skansen, a revelation in terms of functionalist form which for some reason the people of Oslo allowed the powers that be to raze to the ground — as I say: the most unlikely things are forever happening.
‘Rubbish!’ said Gabriel. ‘Be an actor! Build castles in the air, not on the ground. Create illusions inside people’s heads. They’ll outlast structures that’ll be pulled down before you know it anyway.’
The cigarette smoke enveloped him like a swirling veil; it might have been a stage-effect, the only thing lacking was for him to go through to the for’ard cabin and fetch the skull ensconced in the shell of the television. Gabriel smoked Camels as if to betoken his nomadic existence, and Jonas recalled how he and Nefertiti had sometimes bought liquorice cigarettes that came in the most gorgeous packet with a copy of the Camel logo on the front. The camel picture also happened to rank above all others when it came to the cigarette packs they fixed to the spokes of their bike wheels, possibly because it was so rare and hence lent a lot of prestige, as well as being squashy, which meant that they had to glue it onto a piece of cardboard. Seeing Gabriel with his pack of Camels, Jonas had a feeling of being back there, a feeling that everything went in a circle, round and round, like a wheel of fortune.
‘What makes you think I should be an actor?’ Jonas asked, lifting his mug of whisky.
‘To be who you are. Why not follow it through?’