– You talked about moments that can’t be planned. Film involves a lot of planning, the script is written beforehand, and scenes are drawn. You also talked about the sublime. To me, that is something that can’t be produced at will or calculated. How do you relate to that concept in regard to film?
– That’s a good question, and it is a big question. What is the sublime? I think of the sublime in the classical sense, not just as a quality but as something in which elements of form and content go beyond the expected, become greater than themselves. That something transcends. Film has a lot to do with presence, the there-and-then-ness of something, where thoughts and abstractions are concrete, you can see them, they are clear and transparent, but you can’t always grasp them. A sublime moment is a moment which has found a unique form, a unique expression.
– Can you think of an example?
– There is a very well-known scene in Tarkovsky, in Mirror (1975). It is a childhood memory, we are in a small wooden cottage, the first image is almost like a tableau and feels like a memory that could have contained all of time. It is empty, and when I look at it with the eyes of a director, I think: this place has been lived in. Someone has been a child here, someone has been old here, someone has died here. It is as if we are viewing something outside time. Suddenly the camera starts to move, without cuts – the whole scene is shot in one take – and we see some children running through the room, but we see them in a mirror, and when it’s empty, we hear them from the outside, they are shouting that there’s a fire. And then we see that the cowshed is in flames. At the same time it’s raining. And there is nothing anyone can do. It is there and then, it is happening now, in this moment and in the same time-image, for there are no cuts – time flows at twenty-four frames per second – and yet we have moved from the eternal room to the momentary. We realise that this is a moment they will never forget. It is as if the world falls apart. Water co-exists with fire, which those two elements are not supposed to do. And no one can do anything. The world functions on its own, and that is a great insight, both for the children and for their mother. They are just standing there waiting, no one is panicking, they are simply observing this momentous event as it unfolds.
I had to see the film many times before I began to understand why it moved me so powerfully. There are so many time levels in that scene, so many states, which it really shouldn’t be possible to combine. And then it is uniquely filmic. It couldn’t have come about in any other art form than film.
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Some months later I met Joachim and Emil again, they picked me up outside the Grand Hotel in Oslo early one morning, we were going to Åsgårdstrand to film Munch’s house there and the landscape in which so many of his pictures are set. Melancholy, the troubled male figure sitting by the water’s edge with the sky undulating above him; Summer Night’s Dream (The Voice), the woman who stands beckoning and looking straight at the viewer from the forest, with the shoreline and the sea visible between the tree trunks; Girls on the Bridge, the girls leaning against the railing of a jetty with a luminous house and a big dark tree in the distance – all of them show a recognisable, identifiable piece of reality, and it is found in Åsgårdstrand.
Except for a school trip to Knut Hamsun’s home at Nørholm when I was fourteen, I had never before sought out places from the world of art or literature; the pilgrimage aspect of it was alien to me, indeed it seemed almost obscene. All around Stockholm there are plaques with quotes from poems and novels that are set in the place where the plaques are placed, and when I lived there I found them nauseating, it seemed so wrong, for even though the text describing Västerbron in Eyvind Johnson’s Krilon is about Västerbron, or the text describing Tegnérlunden in Astrid Lindgren’s Mio, My Son is about Tegnérlunden, those two entities, the fictitious one – no matter how realistically it was described – and reality itself, had nothing to do with each other. They existed in two different and sharply separate spheres, which shouldn’t and really couldn’t be brought together.
This wasn’t anything I could present a reasoned argument for, it was just a feeling I had, and I wondered how things would turn out in Åsgårdstrand, where the artistic point of departure wasn’t literary but visual.
That both the Grand Hotel and Karl Johan Street were motifs Munch had painted and that both the hotel facade and the layout of streets from that time were intact did not cross my mind. Nor did I think about the fact that Munch and his artist friends used to sit drinking at the Grand, that Ibsen was a regular, or that it was on Karl Johan Street that the young Munch saw his first great love, Milly Thaulow, promenading with her husband and children, or for that matter that this was where the nameless protagonist of Hamsun’s Hunger would lope about. I had my own memories of Oslo, they shone with a stronger light than whatever my memory had stored of events and people I had read about, and that’s how it must have been for those who had been there back then too, Edvard Munch, Hans Jæger, Oda Krohg, Christian Krohg, Sigbjørn Obstfelder, Aase Nørregaard, Milly Thaulow, Knut Hamsun, they too must have felt that history and the past dissolved in the present, and that the present was fluid, improvised, accidental, never entirely unknown but still never quite established – Hamsun wasn’t ‘Hamsun’, just Hamsun, perhaps even just Knut, a self-assured, pugnacious and wilful young man with a hard carapace who wrote newspaper articles about all kinds of things, and Munch wasn’t ‘Munch’, just Munch, perhaps even just Edvard, a sensitive, self-absorbed, often sarcastic young man struggling to free himself of his bonds to home and family without quite succeeding. Both had dreams of greatness, but neither knew if they had it in them, or what it really was. Knut wrote, Edvard painted. How many young people with similar ambitions are there in the world? That both of them did have it in them – not greatness, but actually its opposite, a smallness great enough, or sufficient will to explore smallness, Hamsun with his petty street fights and scenes in public, Munch with his personal memories and feelings of inferiority – the people around them may or may not have understood, either way it would have been in a very different way than we understand it, since ‘Munch’ and ‘Hamsun’ to us are known entities, a kind of emblem, something they obviously never were to themselves, nor to the people around them, not even towards the end of their lives, when they were Norway’s greatest artist and greatest writer respectively. The cult which has arisen around their names, the whole field of associations which they evoke, are like a screen between us and their works, and between them and their lives. Biographers always write to get beneath the myth and the notions clustering around their names, they try to pierce through to the life and the time as it really was, which often gives rise to a new imbalance – I have read biographies about Munch, about Hamsun, about Ernest Hemingway, about Aksel Sandemose, about Agnar Mykle and about Jens Bjørneboe, all of them have powerful myths attached to their names, and all have been portrayed as curiously petty people, in the sense that they were full of serious failings, weaknesses, foolishness and unpleasant personality disorders. Afterwards it was impossible to understand how that person could have written that book or painted that picture. Bjørneboe was perhaps the worst. After reading his biography I got out the books in his trilogy The History of Bestiality (1966–73). I needed only to read a few sentences to see that the man about whose life I had just read, couldn’t have written this. It was impossible for a man like ‘Bjørneboe’, as he was depicted, to have written something so sensitive, insightful and wise, with such presence in the writing. The same applied to Mykle and Hemingway, and to an even greater degree to Sandemose and Hamsun. Why is that? I think that writing about another human being, regardless of how objective one struggles to be, can only be done within the framework of the person writing, in other words the biographer. And since a life is always full of weaknesses, foolishness, triviality, quirks, mistakes, pride and cowardice, indulgence and ambition, the biographer, since he or she sees this, will always stand above their subject, it i
s almost inevitable. But a person is not a person merely from the outside, is not merely the sum of encounters with others, a person is first and foremost a person to themselves, and that is the place one writes from, that is the place one paints from.
After reading Bjørneboe’s biography it is easy to think that he was rather stupid. When you read a book by Bjørneboe you realise that he was anything but stupid. The same is true of Munch. It may sound a little strange, but I have always underestimated Munch, in my eyes he seemed a bit dumb, a bit naive, someone who didn’t understand very much, neither of himself nor of other people. That he was able to paint so well in spite of this, I have thought of more or less as a matter of luck, or that painting is so different from thinking that even a rather stupid fellow might hit upon something. This image of Munch has rarely reached my consciousness in the form of articulated thoughts, it has been more of a vague feeling I have had about him. It wasn’t until I read Sue Prideaux’s biography about him, Behind the Scream, that I caught sight of my prejudice. There he is portrayed at eye level, he isn’t a person the biographer looks down on, and he emerges as a real person, rather like you and me, an existentially searching and very intelligent man, with an experience of loss that marked him and deepened his insight into life. I don’t mean to say that he was a genius, I don’t know what genius is, and I suppose I don’t really believe that such a thing exists among people, only that the insight found in his pictures wasn’t accidental, and that it didn’t have anything to do with his ability to draw, although the ability allowed it to be expressed. The iconic ‘Munch’ can easily take the life out of his pictures, the biographical ‘Munch’ can easily take the pictures away from the life.
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It was cold on the morning we were going to Åsgårdstrand, minus five degrees, and the still pitch-black sky was covered with fog. People on their way to work walked by as I stood waiting outside the Grand Hotel, the sound of their footsteps ricocheting between the facades of the buildings, and I remembered how Oslo could be, that peculiar silence in the streets, how people walked by without a word, and how that feeling of silence could be there even when groups of people talking went by, dissolving their footsteps and words.
A black car came driving down the pedestrian street and pulled up on the pavement. It was Emil and Joachim. I climbed in, into the warm, faintly humming interior, and we drove out of Oslo, along roads and past buildings I wouldn’t have noticed fifteen years earlier but which I now saw and thought of as being Norwegian. All the spruces, the hills and hillsides, all the wooden houses, the yellow road signs and the yellow dividing line, the small boat marina. The bus sheds made of concrete embedded with pebbles. The small Norwegian flags on the number plates, Emil and Joachim’s manner and jargon, so different from the Swedish I was usually surrounded by.
Our own culture envelops us, and at times it can feel suffocating because so much of it affirms us, but when you have been away from it for a while, this enveloping feels good, the affirmation it offers feels almost healing.
That’s what I was thinking about as we drove south while dawn rose, with the fog suspended between the trees and over the fields which suddenly opened up in places. And then I thought how strange life was, which had now led me here, to this very car with these very people, to walk in the footsteps of a man who had been dead for more than seventy years, and whom I had learned about in school a long time ago.
After less than an hour we left the main road and turned off towards Åsgårdstrand. The fog was so dense that I couldn’t get an overview of the town, all one could see were the streets we drove on; in the direction where I assumed the fjord must lie there was just a wall of grey.
The other members of the film crew were standing in a car park, waiting outside in the cold. We parked next to them, and Joachim and I each got a microphone clipped to our jackets before we headed down the road with the camera first in front and later behind us. The streets looked roughly the way they must have looked a hundred years ago, with their old white wooden houses and little gardens. When I turned round and looked up the road, I recognised one of Munch’s motifs, a street with some children lying on the roadway and a girl peering out of the picture. That must be from here, I thought. It gave me a strange feeling, for some things were recognisable while others were not, and the recognisable part was so intangible that it reminded me of a dream that springs to mind and which slips further and further away the more you try to remember it.
There wasn’t a soul in sight, no activity anywhere, only the motionless houses and the empty street.
Within one garden there was a rock formation, twisted and volcanic-looking, like frozen lava except that the rocks were greyish.
– He painted those rocks, I said. – One of the pictures in the exhibition must be of them, I’m almost sure of it.
– Shall we have a look? Joachim said.
Standing in front of the rocks I became uncertain, for the picture I was thinking of looked almost like stones on a heath with the ocean in the background, while here they lay in the middle of a housing development. At the same time there was no mistaking the shape of the rocks, it had to be them.
Since then I have seen those rocks in many of his pictures from Åsgårdstrand and realised that he never went very far away to paint – the rocks lay perhaps fifty metres from his house, and most of his town pictures were painted in that same stub of a road. Many of the beach pictures are from the beach just below the house, and many of the garden pictures from his own garden. It wasn’t just local, it was extremely local.
I liked it so much, seeing how small and narrow the world of his motifs was. Those rocks could have been something one remembered from childhood, rocks one used to play on, or they could have been something one barely registered on one’s way to the shop to buy bread rolls in the morning. In the pictures they had a very particular significance, as a place in the world, by the sea, beneath the sky, there they were existentially charged, painted as a painter would have painted Calvary or another place of great importance. But in itself Calvary is just a hill like any other, its importance has been assigned to it by us. By giving the same attention and weight to all his motifs, Munch demonstrated that to be a human being in the world is the same everywhere, and that significance lies within ourselves. Therefore, laundry hanging from a clothes line in the garden can have as much existential weight as a biblical or mythological motif. Or some peculiar-looking rocks in a garden in a small Norwegian seaside resort.
We walked on, still with the camera crew in front of us.
– That must be his house, Joachim said and nodded towards a small ochre house on the other side of the road. And sure enough, on the wall hung a white sign with the words MUNCH’S HOUSE.
– It’s so small! I said.
– Almost like a cottage, Joachim said. – Shall we go down into the garden and have a look?
The garden behind the house was narrow but long, descending rather steeply towards a beach.
– The picture of the fight with Ludvig Karsten must have been painted around here, he said. – Karsten is lying here, and Munch is standing here, and then the house is back there.
– You’re right, I said. – But the house seems so much bigger in the painting!
We walked up to the front of the house again, where a woman stood waiting for us. She told us that everything inside was the way it had been when Munch died, except that it wasn’t as messy as it had been then. We bent our heads and went in. The white winter light fell softly into the room, which was strikingly small: a writing desk beneath the window, a bed by the wall, a cupboard in the corner. A small kitchen within, and then a small bedroom with another bed, that was all. We walked around in there for a while, looking at things; his winter coat hung on a peg, on another hung a suit jacket and a waistcoat, in the corner cupboard stood bottles of medicines, turpentine, tubes of paint and a well-worn palette. Below stood a
pair of black dress shoes, they were small, size 42 at most.
So Much Longing in So Little Space Page 17
