Authors: Jan Kjaerstad
The classroom itself altered character completely depending upon which
map he had pulled down. The atmosphere in the room was different when savannah-covered Africa hung down over the board than when South
America’s
rugged Andean spine dominated the field of vision. Sometimes Jonas thought that the maps made the front of the class with the dais and lectern look more like the stage in a theatre. And the sheets of paper hanging rolled up, one behind the other, on that marvellous rack were prospective sets or backdrops. ‘Today we’re going to talk about the Nile,’ Mr Dehli said,
loosening
his bow tie; and even though it was winter and the classroom was cold, once the wall behind the schoolmaster had been covered by the Middle East and Egypt with their warm green and yellow hues, Jonas was hard put not to remove his jersey. He was transported back to his childhood, to when he had been the owner of an elegant, aromatic cigarette tin with a picture on the lid of the sphinx, the pyramids and Simon Arzt in a red fez.
Many of Mr Dehli’s teaching
tours de forces
involved maps or globes. By turning the world upside down he taught them the meaning of the word ‘perspective’. On one occasion he actually cut an old map of the world in two, right up the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. ‘Why should the Atlantic always been in the centre?’ he asked. ‘Let’s stick it together again with the Pacific in the middle.’ The effect was remarkable. Suddenly Norway was right out on the periphery, up in the far corner – though, to Jonas’s satisfaction, still in a possible Outside Left position. ‘What if so-called Western supremacy was no more than a parenthesis in history?’ Mr Dehli said, thereby
anticipating
those prophecies made towards the end of the millennium to the effect that the balance of economic power would shift to the east. During another lesson he held up a globe at a particular angle: ‘What do you see?’ They were looking straight at the Pacific Ocean. They could just make out the edges of the continents around the rim of the circle. Jonas had had a globe of the world for years, but had never realised that it could be viewed from such an angle. ‘Nothing but sea,’ Mr. Dehli said. ‘Has it ever occurred to you that
seventy-five
per cent of the Earth’s surface is covered in water?’ This was during a history lesson, on Vasco da Gama. Mr Dehli then went on to tell them about the great voyages of discovery and the background to them, about sailing ships and navigation. You never forgot it. It seemed to Jonas that this was the whole point of lessons: to teach them how to navigate. Through life.
Mr Dehli’s use of maps to illustrate
māyā
had its sequel in a Christmas show put on by the pupils in the classroom. It was actually during this same show that Leonard – or Leonardo, rather – despite restless rumblings from his classmates, showed his first 8 mm cine film, a bleak drama in which Jonas and Pernille played a boy and a girl in black polo-neck sweaters, standing back to back in an open field with a huge bulldozer in the background.
Jonas was a much bigger hit on his own and in the flesh. He did an
impression
of Mr Dehli, wearing a jacket and a bow tie deliberately and hilariously askew. ‘Today I am going to tell you about Maya,’ he said, getting a laugh right away by playing on his own misapprehension and pronouncing
māyā
like the girl’s name. All the maps had been pulled down beforehand – and at the very back hung an affectionate caricature of Mr Dehli himself. Gesticulating wildly and brandishing his pointer Jonas worked up to his big conjuring trick. But just as he was about to tug on the first cord, acutely aware that all eyes were upon him, he suddenly began to feel very self-conscious, was struck by a terrible fit of shyness, with the result that he tugged too hard; he thought the map was stuck, so he yanked as hard as he could, the map rack came away from the wall and the whole kit and caboodle came crashing down on top of him, to the riotous glee of the class. Jonas must have lifted the pointer on instinct, in an attempt to defend himself against this avalanche of
countries
and continents, because he came round to find himself sitting on the floor like an emperor draped in a many-layered cloak, with the pointer stuck through the map of Asia. ‘That was the day when the world came tumbling about my ears,’ he was fond of saying.
Mr Dehli showed that he had appreciated this performance by laughing louder than anyone else. ‘I think you’re going to be a great discoverer,’ he said, straightening Jonas’s cock-eyed bow tie on the way out. I should perhaps add that the pointer had not pierced the map just anywhere. Jonas had actually run it right through Samarkand. Thus providing, you might say, the perfect illustration of
māyā
. In any case, from that day on, Samarkand stood for him as a reality behind reality, he developed a belief that there was a Samarkand behind Samarkand.
The memory of those maps and his attempt to demonstrate the concept of
māyā
cropped up more than once during the making of his televised portrait of Edvard Munch, a programme which also showed quite clearly how intent Jonas Wergeland was on challenging people’s deeper awareness, or the way they
saw
things – what Mr Dehli would have called their philosophy of life. Although
Thinking Big
attracted record-breaking audiences, Wergeland was less interested in viewing figures than in the imprint which the series might leave on people’s minds. In this respect he was a true programme-maker; he wished to programme, or reprogramme, the Norwegian people’s way of thinking.
Owing to his own unforgettable encounter with the wall decorations in one of Oslo’s public buildings – an experience to which we will return – Jonas was seriously tempted to focus on Munch’s popular murals for the Oslo
University
assembly hall, but he eventually came down in favour of an early phase
in the artist’s life. In the key scene, the young Munch was shown standing in a large circular room with many windows. Viewers saw him walking slowly from one window to the next; gazing, clearly moved, out of each of them in turn, as if looking out onto a bewildering and troubling world. Thereafter he sat down on a bench in the centre of the room, his elbow propped on his thigh and his chin resting on his fist, like Rodin’s celebrated sculpture ‘The Thinker’. Here was a man at what was arguably the most crucial stage of his life; a man who had just lost his father, a man who had had the benefit of a couple of inspiring sojourns in France, in St Cloud and Nice, a young man who had only just begun to see what he wanted to do in his art, to find his own style. And underpinning the images of this man deep in thought, nothing but the sound of a brush on canvas. To the viewers it must have seemed as though the deep musings, or memories, around which his thoughts revolved had generated the vision or metamorphosis that now occurred, with first one, then another window, one prospect then another – still accompanied only by the rasp of a brush – turning first into a translucent panel, not unlike a transparent map, and then into a painting, until the circular room was seen to be a gallery, its walls hung with works recognisable as Munch’s own, canvases covered with lines and colours which – one could tell – Munch had seen in his mind’s eye. The world had become art.
Jonas Wergeland had filled the room with over twenty pictures painted by Munch around this time, including a number from the series which Munch would later dub The Frieze of Life. His idea, one which may even have begun to germinate while he was in France, was to create a series of paintings which would present an overall picture of existence, of all the stages of human life. The canvases which formed a circle round Munch showed individuals and landscapes reduced to timeless, placeless images. All inessentials had been omitted. Here were such pictures as ‘Night’ and ‘Evening’ – later renamed ‘Melancholy’; viewers spotted ‘The Sick Girl’, ‘Puberty’ and ‘Death in the
Sick-room
, ‘Jealousy’ and ‘Despair’ – Jonas did also include a few pictures painted one or two years later. The camera captured a room which bore little
resemblance
to other rooms containing nineteenth-century Norwegian art, those in the National Gallery in Oslo, for example, full of works by Tideman and Gude, Fearnley and Dahl. You did not play Tchaikovsky in such a room, Debussy or Stravinsky might have done at a push.
In the next scene, Munch was seen pacing restlessly back and forth, round the walls of the room, continually taking down pictures, switching them about, as if he could not decide which paintings should hang next to one another. He evidently felt that there were hidden links between some, or all, of the works, some inner bond. At long last he appeared to be satisfied, sat
down again on the bench in his Thinker position. And once more one had the sense of great mental exertion, the impression that Edvard Munch was endeavouring to think about all the pictures, all of these key experiences, at once. And as if it were a result of this very process of visualisation, of the
profound
insight thus attained, something happened to the pictures: they began to live and breathe. Each painting turned into a screen filled with moving pictures. The works of art, the flat canvases, came to life, with each film
presenting
a plot, a drama which corresponded with the subject matter of the picture, before they all faded, in perfect sync, into exactly the same scene: a couple kissing, closely entwined, a man and a woman at one of life’s sacred moments. Edvard Munch sat in the circular room, watching as all
twenty-odd
paintings, or films, became identical, with every scene showing a couple clinging to one another, almost merging into one, in a kiss.
After a prolonged close-up of Munch’s anxious features, his eyes, the camera pulled back to reveal a room once more lined with Munch’s famous works, the kissing couple turned back into the painting entitled ‘The Kiss’. At this point in the programme Jonas Wergeland appeared on screen, in the foreground, in the guise of a reporter and advised in a whisper, before disappearing again just as quietly, that we were in Berlin, the year was 1892 and Edvard Munch had been invited by Verien Berliner Künstler, the Berlin Society of Artists, to exhibit his pictures in the Architektenhaus, in the
circular
gallery. The exhibition was about to open.
Munch stood up. The soundtrack consisted solely of heartbeats, heavy breathing, the occasional cough. Munch crossed to the nearest paintings. Viewers could now see cords attached to the bottom of each frame. One by one Munch tugged the cords, as if the paintings were roller blinds, and they positively shot up to disclose entirely different pictures underneath. One was given to understand that Munch did the same to every single picture because, when he left the circular room, on the walls hung twenty-odd
unrecognisable
paintings, glowing ominously and offensively. These pictures had been produced by Jonas’s skilled technicians; they were digitally distorted versions of Munch’s images; hideous pictures with garish colours and tortuous figures, a long way from the modern idea of a good painting. This was Wergeland’s way of showing that we have already forgotten how radical Munch’s work once was, how
differently
he painted. He did not observe, he
saw
. To us, those paintings with their smouldering energy had long since become tame
calendar
fodder, something for the bedroom wall, reproductions to hang in our toilets. It was no longer considered shocking for someone to paint a tree without showing the branches, or a green face, or a countenance with no nose, ears, mouth; for paint to be squirted onto the canvas. With his distorted
images, these ‘new’ Munch pictures, Jonas Wergeland wanted to show just how outlandish the original works must have seemed to his contemporaries, what an outrageously far cry they were from anything else being painted at that time, not least in the German art world, where battle scenes and
naturalistic
pictures were all the rage. Wergeland may even have wished to imply that somewhere in Norway today there had to be another young Munch – an artist we laughed at. It was ironic, certainly, that so many of those who
complained
to NRK about this scene resorted to the same sort of invective as was levelled at Munch by critics of his day. These ‘new’ pictures in Jonas
Wergeland’s
otherwise enthralling programme had to be the work of some ‘
charlatan
painter’, they wrote; those painting were nothing but hideous ‘daubs’, ‘feverish hallucinations’.
The scene ended with the doors of the gallery being opened to the Berlin public. Jonas Wergeland presented close-ups of faces streaming past, their features expressing shock, disgust, laughter, fury. The last shot was of the face of a man putting his hands to his head and screaming in horror at what he had seen.
When this programme was shown on British television – one newspaper described it as being every bit as revolutionary in terms of form and colour as Munch’s pictures – Jonas Wergeland felt that he had repaid a little of his debt; he knew how much he owed to Great Britain after his course of study in a hotel room in London. In fact, towards the tail end of that ‘term’, as he liked to call it, Wergeland himself witnessed something which made him want to scream. This too involved seeing, seeing something behind reality – or what, up to this point in his life, he had taken for reality. In London, he would think later, it wasn’t just my outer eye that got whacked, but my inner eye too.
One afternoon, before the start of the day’s programmes, Jonas took the tube out to White City to take a look at an edifice which held for him the same sacred status as St Paul’s Cathedral, and was as closely bound up in his mind with the proud history and culture of Britain as Trafalgar Square or Bloomsbury: the BBC Television Centre at Wood Lane. Jonas stood outside the brick façade, aware that he was looking at a monument to a highly advanced civilisation. The old British Empire might have collapsed, but what he saw before him, or that which it represented, British television, was the seat of a new, modern empire – an invisible dominion. And the might of this empire was founded on such diverse wonders as
The Great War, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, The Six Wives of Henry VIII, The Dave Allen Show
and
The Voyage of Charles Darwin
.