The Conqueror

Master of the Art of Survival

Speaking of that white light over the water, the mist — speaking of the lifeboat: I have not given up hope of being able to do it, to save him, save her, because Jonas Wergeland is still standing with his finger on the trigger, aiming at Margrete’s heart, has got no further than this, because he is thinking about the seconds it took him to walk from the workshop with the pistol in his pocket, a pistol he really did not want to use, into the living room, where he stood and watched the light fading outside the window, a dark-blue sky with a band of yellow on the horizon, before he noticed that Margrete was now sitting on the sofa with an orange in her hand, staring at the television which she had switched on; he stood there watching how she shifted the orange fruit, absentmindedly, from hand to hand, how she seemed to be suspended in a vacuum between the glare from the television and the unspeakably beautiful, fading light outside the window, in a place where he cannot reach her, and he remembers her way of peeling an orange, slowly and deftly, in such a way that the fruit itself becomes a ball of light with a spiral-shaped tail hanging below it, like a big, pearly spermatozoon, a symbol of life, ‘Axel,’ she says out of the blue, and he starts. ‘Axel popped by the other day to borrow the programme on Amundsen,’ she says and nods at the screen as if to explain what brought it into her mind, ‘but I couldn’t find the cassette,’ she says, cupping both hands protectively around the orange.

The programme on Amundsen opened with a scene from a lecture tour of America in 1907, a hall full of people and Roald Amundsen speaking and presenting a magic lantern show, as it was then known: a Roald Amundsen who clearly did not like doing this but was forced to go on these lucrative tours in order to pay off some of his debts. Jonas Wergeland had endeavoured to capture the atmosphere and the audience’s air of expectancy, remind people of a time when there were still — quite literally — white spots on the map; he shared with the viewers those faded, hand-tinted pictures of Amundsen and his men during their ordeals in that frozen wasteland: excellent photographs by the standards of the day but which, to Jonas Wergeland’s eyes, only made it clear that all they had left of those heroes now were some colourless snaps, and with one of the palest of these he let the light take over completely, turning the picture into dancing ‘snow’, a swirl of dots out of which the outline of a figure gradually emerged — like the picture used to do, back in television’s infancy, when you adjusted the aerial — until eventually the real live Amundsen stood revealed, standing in the polar light at Gjoa Haven in the far north of Canada. The washed-out photograph had been transformed into bright, colourful reality. Amundsen was seen from the side, but it was easy to tell just from that strong profile that his face was glowing with happiness; it was a true magic lantern picture: a magical, light-suffused picture of a man in his own personal paradise.

I must say something about this light; it was of crucial significance to Jonas Wergeland. Not for nothing had he worked so hard on the lighting in his programmes. A lot of people have remarked on Jonas Wergeland’s inventiveness, his technical brilliance and, more than anything, his uniquely charismatic face, but for Jonas himself it all came down to light, to darkness and light. From the moment he started in television he knew that here, in the flickering of the TV screen, he had found, as Amundsen had done in the radiance of the ice, the golden fleece he had always been endeavouring to win: unsuccessfully at first, through music, then the study of the stars, then architecture. To Jonas Wergeland, television was primarily light. He was at all times conscious of the TV screen’s dual function, as a projector of visual images and as a lamp: it often amazed him, when a television was switched on, to see how well it lit up a dark room. Making television programmes was storytelling with light. It was no coincidence that NRK celebrated the screening of the last programme in the series — in December, no less, on the darkest day of the year — with a little, internal, torchlight procession or that one, possibly rather overexcited, individual referred to Jonas Wergeland in a speech of congratulation as a Prometheus, an enlightener, the one who brought fire to mankind. Jonas himself was more modest: ‘All I’ve done is to strike twenty-odd matches in a dark grave,’ he said.

Hence the reason that Jonas dwelled for so long on that picture of Roald Amundsen standing in the glaring light of the frozen wasteland, like a worshipper before a crucifix. Needless to say, Jonas Wergeland never came close to choosing the trek to the South Pole as the central element in his programme. He wanted to focus on another Amundsen, on the skills that were the secret behind the success of the South Pole expedition. Because, the way Jonas saw it, Amundsen was a collector. He did not simply collect artefacts from a foreign culture, though. Above all else, what he collected was knowledge, about everything that could help him to survive the cold. Jonas concentrated, therefore, on Amundsen’s first major expedition, the Gjøa’s voyage through the North-West Passage, that barrier of ice, and the programme placed little emphasis on the formidable fact that Amundsen and his six men were the first to sail all the way through this passage in one ship; instead it centred on the daily life of the team during the two years they spent in the country around Gjoa Haven, a little bay on King William Island, as they charted hitherto unknown areas and made scientific measurements close to the magnetic North Pole — activities which were as nothing compared to their encounter with the nomadic hunters of the region, an Eskimo tribe called the Netsilik: ‘people of the seal’. In the old days men had dreamed of a shortcut to the East, a hidden passage, possibly up here in the north, and like Columbus discovering America in his attempt to find another route to the East, Amundsen, too, found his New World, namely the world of the Inuit. Amundsen liked it here. He perceived that the Arctic was an enigma, that it harboured mysteries of which we knew little but which presented a challenge to our technological presumption, as an Arctic iceberg would take the Titanic itself by such grimly symbolic surprise.

The Amundsen programme proved to be the most expensive in Jonas Wergeland’s series. For one thing, it was filmed on location, near today’s Gjoa Haven, and late in the winter at that, both in order to film scenes of the harsh winter conditions — they were lucky enough to catch one of the season’s last storms — and to get some shots of the hunting. And for another, Jonas used a lot of the locals as extras and did not stint when it came to props: teams of dogs, Eskimo suits made from reindeer skin and so on. They even built a rough facsimile of the old Gjoa Haven in a bay, with the Villa Magnet, the Uranienborg astronomical observatory, igloos and all — the boat alone was a set: all they needed was the rigging jutting out of the snow like an antenna. It seemed that Jonas Wergeland did not want to spare any expense when it came to the depiction of a Norwegian who had displayed those rare qualities: curiosity, a willingness to learn — and respect for another people.

The programme revolved, in other words, around Amundsen the ethnographer, a man who patiently observed the way of thinking and the way of life in an icebound region: an image which broke with most people’s view of Amundsen as nothing but an adventurer on skis, a ruthless egotist who would walk over anybody to get where he wanted. In Jonas Wergeland’s programme, Amundsen came over as a man who took an enormous interest in his fellow men and had a knack for getting on with people. In scene after scene one was shown how keen Amundsen was to learn tricks which could save a life in extreme weather conditions, how he studied the products of the Eskimos’ inventiveness, everything from the five different items which went to make up their footwear to the technique for checking the quality of the snow; from the difficult art of building an igloo to the way in which, when travelling across hard-packed snow, one should allow a thin layer of ice to form on the runners of the dogsled. These scenes must be among the finest ever shown on a television screen when it comes to depicting life amid the snow and ice, something every Norwegian is certainly in a position to appreciate. But above all else, viewers were shown how Amundsen learned the two lessons which would bring him victory in the race to the South Pole: firstly, how to dress in trousers and anoraks of animal pelts, from the skin out — in other words: no woollen underwear — and leave both the inner and the outer anoraks hanging loosely outside his trousers, to create an insulating layer of air between them and prevent a build-up of sweat; and — secondly — how Amundsen and his men, especially Helmer Hanssen, picked up a lot of new and important tips regarding equipment and techniques for handling dogsleds. They learned one particularly vital lesson: in extreme cold and snow the only thing you could depend on was the dogs. ‘On this expedition Amundsen not only conquered the North-West Passage,’ Jonas Wergeland said, addressing the camera during his regular spot in the programme. ‘He also won an insight into the art of survival. When all is said and done, it was here in the north that he conquered the South Pole.’

The Amundsen programme was full of scenes that caused viewers to avert their eyes. During the last hectic days of shooting outside today’s Gjoa Haven, just before the advent of spring, Jonas Wergeland had been granted permission to reconstruct an old-style hunt for the first wild reindeer of the year, which were felled on land with bows and arrows. Jonas got in plenty of close-ups from the slaughtering, showed the slashing of the knives — most of them pretty primitive — showed the blood, the entrails, the meat being warmed, people gobbling it down, people cracking bones and slurping up the marrow, people scooping up the contents of the reindeer’s stomach and drinking them down; there were pictures of raw meat, dripping grease, bloodstained fingers and lips, dogs baring their teeth: a glimpse of life pared down, quite literally, to the bare bones. And in the midst of this steaming tableau: Roald Amundsen, looking exactly like an Eskimo.

Here and there Jonas had inserted shots from the collection of Netsilik weapons and artefacts which Amundsen had brought home with him and which was now on exhibit in the Ethnographic Museum in Oslo. With this montage he managed to say something about the gap between the dusty, neatly-arranged glass cases — Jonas himself had found this place deadly boring as a child — and the bloody, ice-cold reality, what a far cry it was from that incredible hunting aid, the kiviutchjervi, as it looked hanging on the wall of the museum, to an actual seal hunt. In one long sequence, filmed in total silence, Jonas Wergeland showed how the Netsilik caught the little fur seals found in that area; how first, with the dogs’ help, and often through a layer of snow several feet deep on top of the ice, they located a breathing hole and how they then, by dint of a number of remarkable devices, chief among them the aforementioned kiviutchjervi, which consisted of a length of reindeer sinew and some tiny bits of wood with a piece of swansdown stretched between them — in actual fact an ingenious sensor which told them when a seal was approaching — were finally able to drive the three-pronged harpoon into the seal, even through a thick layer of snow, just as it was coming up for air. This was the high point of the programme, and Jonas did not stint when it came to detailed shots of the seal lying at last on the ice and the hunters ripping out the liver and kidneys and eating them right there and then, raw. He followed this with a scene inside an igloo, where the animal was being skinned and quartered with the ulo and its entrails dropped into a pot for heating up. As people watched white teeth munching on such delicacies as the seal’s eyes and brains they could almost smell the whale oil burning in the lamps, hear the dogs howling and feel the bite of the icy polar air. Some viewers claimed that they sat there shivering in front of the screen. And afterwards they got themselves something to eat. ‘I’ve never been as hungry,’ was the comment from NRK’s own director.

Amundsen was no hunter, he didn’t like hunting, but you had to take life if you wanted to survive, kill with your bare hands if necessary. Even so, there was something terribly barbaric about this programme; it was just a little too raw and primitive. There were some who felt that Jonas Wergeland had used unnecessarily shocking effects, as if he were out to break some taboo. I don’t suppose anyone would have been surprised to find that just such a programme, containing so much bloody harpooning of seals, so many red-stained patches of ice, would be studied carefully by forensic psychiatrists, when the man who had made it turned out to be a murderer.

Jonas Wergeland was also accused more than once of being a con artist. Certain experts maintained that he had chosen the less well known, or at any rate, less well documented aspects of the series’ heroes for obvious reasons: he didn’t know the first thing about them. By highlighting a less well-recognized facet of a character he ensured that fewer people could check the accuracy of the scenes he presented — and the fact that he focused on just one aspect of his heroes’ lives meant that the majority of viewers also believed Jonas Wergeland knew everything about them, that he was just as well informed about the rest of their lives. That is not for me to decide, Professor, I will simply say that if Jonas did not know almost all there was to know about Amundsen, then he hid it well.

More serious was the assertion that he used the same key to an understanding of all his subjects. He presented them as mediocrities or, to be more precise, mediocrities in every area except one. One could, therefore, be tempted to say that he modelled them on himself. Every one of them had a unique gift for which they found a special use. In Amundsen’s case it was his stubborn, obsessive efforts to learn by experiment — even to the extent of wearing in a new pair of expedition boots by walking up and down Karl Johans gate in them; an almost alarming determination when it came to acquiring as much knowledge as possible about how to survive in snow and ice, in extreme cold. As I say: Roald Amundsen was a champion when it came to doing his homework. Without this, no Norwegian flag at the South Pole.

For what it is worth, I think it would be truer to say that Jonas Wergeland did not create these people in his image, but that he did try to give himself some hope, by depicting his heroes in the way that he did. If there was any truth in his portraits of Amundsen and the others — well, then there was hope for him, too. Jonas Wergeland wished, in other words, albeit latently perhaps, to create, or attempt to recreate, himself through the images of his subjects. In any case, he saw no point in celebrating a person who had everything going for him and achieved his goal. There was, however, good reason to salute someone who, despite their limited abilities, succeeded in conquering a corner of an unknown world. The message Jonas Wergeland wished to convey was a hopeful one: one, just one, great thought can be enough. One single, unusual thought — and you can do something that no one has done before.

In the short run, though, no one was thinking along such lines. Since the Amundsen programme was sent out during the winter, people were too busy rushing out into the snowdrifts. All over Norway courses in igloo building were suddenly being arranged. The Evening News did a piece on a hardy family with young children who had lived in a snow-hole for a full week. Jonas Wergeland himself could confirm that there had never been so many ice-fishers on the lakes around Oslo — it was, as he said in an interview, as if the Norwegians had suddenly discovered that they were Eskimos at heart.