Polar Geekfest

In Oslo our busy shooting schedule had no free days built in, but I was very much hoping that somewhere I would find a moment to sneak across the harbor and visit what might best be described as the "Museums of Norwegian Pride district." There, beside the bay in a tranquil neighborhood of rolling pastures and rocky coastline, a cluster of small museums celebrate Vikings, Norse seafaring, Thor Heyerdal’s silly Kon-Tiki expedition and two of the world's pre-eminent polar explorers, Fridtjof Nansen and Roald Amundsen, commemorated in a building housing the legendary Fram. Commissioned by Nansen, the Colin Archer designed expedition ship was in 1936 hauled out of the water on log rollers, and parked permanently ashore. An A-frame building (or perhaps an A-fram) was then built around her where she sat on the grass.

To me the Fram is the most legendary of all ships ever to sail in polar waters, and I wanted frantically to prowl her decks. Built to order for Nansen's mind boggling journey, begun in 1893, on which he sailed north from Christiania (Oslo's name at the time), the ship was intentionally frozen into the pack ice in the hope of drifting with slow but inexorable flow of the ice-cap, toward and over the north pole. That the ship survived this three-year ordeal and returned unscathed to Oslo is incredible enough. Nansen then lent her to Amundsen, who sailed her to the Ross Sea en route to his successful assault on the South Pole. So when a morning opening in the schedule presented itself, I rose early and leapt on the number 30 bus to Bygdoy.

Inside this humble yellow structure lurks the Fram, masts and all

In a building built to fit around the ship as tightly as possible, it was difficult to capture the entirety of the vessel

A dangling, taxidermied albatross decorates the rigging

Mr. Personality: One reason Roald Amundsen may have had trouble getting his due in the annals of exploration is that even the statues commissioned of him, which one might imagine would err only in exaggerating his natural charm and winning good looks, depict him as a surly, taciturn and eagle-beaked bundle of grouchiness. No wonder the handsome Scott, who arrived at the South Pole late and then froze to death for his pains, epically failing, is more famous.


Two stories of walkways lined with glass cases allow the visitor to observe the Fram while drooling over all the various claptrap one would have expected to find on board an expedition ship a hundred years ago. In one case an unannotated emperor penguin egg nestles up against the bow of a violin. (This rather an unfair display, since Apsley Cherry Garrard, "Birdie" Bowers and Edward Wilson risked their lives to become the first to successfully collect one of the former, well before Amundsen's journey south). An adjacent case holds Amundsen's boxy wooden film camera. Stuffed auks from the north share a diorama with penguins and seals from the south. Here are tin pots, cutlery, weapons, desks and bookcases, touched by the greats. Incomparable vicarious pleasures are here available to the polar geek.

The original "bunny boots," as the white rubber monstrosities now issued to McMurdo visitors are known.


"Session too complex." The Norwegians are very fair and evenhanded. An orgy of indecipherable color-coded squiggles demarcate the movements of just about every ship ever to sail into the Ross Sea.

Arriving moments after the opening of the museum, I found myself all alone on the deck of the Fram. It took some time, but I was as persistent as any polar explorer and finally managed to figure out how to use the self-timer mechanism on my camera.

A first effort, in which I was a bit slow to respond to the captain's order to take over the helm.

My second attempt. Determined to remedy the tardiness illustrated in the first photo, I failed to pay attention to what was perhaps an even more important shortcoming...

That's more like it, but does this steering wheel make me look fat?

Moments later a busload of German tourists arrived, quickly casting doubt on the originality of my concept.

The actual plates from which actual explorers ate their hoosh!

The gift shop carries a full line of replicas. At 38 euros fifty for a cheap enameled tin teapot, however, the visitor could be forgiven for imagining that he was purchasing an original. Oslo makes Tokyo look like a bargain paradise; it is by far the most expensive city I've even been in, particularly with the US dollar following Zimbabwe's in a savage tailspin. How about a grilled cheese sandwich for twenty dollars? Cup of coffee? $7. Ten block taxi fare: $30. Thank goodness I'm on the job!

My Norwegian is no better now than it was when I arrived in Olso, but I was able to deduce that some one hundred years ago, Amundsen successfully reached the South Pole.... Alt vel that endt vel!

Where the fat lady Sings

What people do lately on Saturday afternoons in Oslo is go to the Opera. Not that anyone is singing there. The Norwegians just want to check out their latest architectural jewel, a seven-hundred-million dollar granite and marble theater that literally slides into the harbor, just a stone's throw from their quaintly diminutive stock exchange.


I first walked by early on Friday morning on my way to work, but as I was at the time having a paranoid episode involving a possible failure to correctly adjust my clock to the local time, I didn't stop to explore its imposing, then-deserted, white surfaces. Convinced that I was an hour late for a twenty-minute interview with George Soros, I hurried on.


Luckily, and as usual, I turned out to have been deluding myself. When I returned on Saturday's lunch break I found the place thronged with people. There were literally lines to get into the building, and its vast external expanses of public space were crawling with blonde, Scandinavian humanity.


Immediately, I could see why. It is a splendid structure, preconceived as a post-apocalyptic edifice; with its exterior spaces just as useful and appealing as its interior ones, the place, for it is as much a place as a building, is constructed as if it had already collapsed and begun to slide into the sea. Oslo has suddenly poured itself a vast white sand beach, where no tropical waterfront existed before, and many will be the bathing beauties who come to baste here in the lunch-hour rays of the summer sun.


The building is, deservedly, a crowd pleaser. Walkers willing to do a bit of steep climbing may circumnavigate a central glass wedge, which shields the theater proper. In the winter, radiant floor heating warms the sloping granite surfaces, preventing an icy condition. Nonetheless, this is a building that would never reach the construction stage in the United States, not so much thanks to our lack of architectural vision, but because of our enthusiasm for litigation.


Integrated into the harbor because of the way the building slides into the water, as if global warming had already caused the sea level to rise (one wonders if the rising yet to come was considered in the rest of the construction), the opera house also fits seamlessly into the city landscape, thanks to its many expanses of reflective glass. Glimmers of the goings on in the darker interior compete with exterior reflections of the skyline, so that the windows, viewed from outside, make a constantly shifting, multilayered artwork. This is one of those buildings where it is difficult to take a bad photograph, an attribute I find is a strong indicator of good architecture.


Inside, the performance space is defined by a spiral decorated in classic Scandinavian style; from the lobby it looks rather like an organic version of the original New York City Guggenheim, but made out of strips of blonde wood.


Despite many complex and exciting surfaces, including the black Venetian plaster in the bathrooms, the braille-like aluminum exterior cladding, and this backlit wall of diamond shaped tiles mixed in with their own voids, the overall effect is of a simple and desirable Nordic sparseness. It is a big structure, but because so much of its exterior is essentially camouflaged as a beach, it is no way imposing or bombastic.


For once, in our era of big-name, ego driven architectural commissions, here is an important building designed by a firm, not some would-be artist forging a personal style so that he can put his name on the building as if it were a brand of sneaker. I had never heard of Snøhetta, but they spent far more time thinking about how people might use this building than they did about worrying whether anyone would immediately know who built it. [Warning, link is to vicious, Adobe Flash 9 website--perhaps Snøhetta should have kept their web design in-house.]


The attention to detail only adds to the pleasure. Here, each tree of this forest-like collection of coathooks in the open-plan cloakroom doubles as an invisible lamp, projecting a soft white light up onto the ceiling from within the column.


Along the lines of the visual coincidences outlined in Lawrence Weschler's spectacular book, Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences, it was impossible, looking at the reflections in the glass, not to think of Pieter Brueghel.

Home of the Brave Polarforskers

Tomorrow is the World Premiere of ICE PEOPLE, the movie I helped make in the second half of 2006 in Antarctica. This is a special event not only because that project inspired me to begin this blog, or because the director Anne Aghion, after six trips to Rwanda and months in a tent in Antarctica together, has become a great friend, but because this is a really beautiful movie. My west coast readers should rush to see it at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas during the San Francisco Film Festival. Anne will be present for Q&As following the first two screenings.

Saturday, April 26th, 6:45 p.m. (Theater 3)
Monday, April 28th, 3:30 p.m. (Theater 1)
Wednesday, April 30th, 1:15 p.m. (Theater 1)

If, like me, you tragically cannot attend, you can watch the trailer, and then start agitating to get your cinema to bring ICE PEOPLE to your local screen.

There is a double irony in my unavailability for this historic event: I am at the moment working on a film being produced by the chairman of the board of the very same San Francisco Film Festival, and we are away filming for that project in Oslo, Norway, port of departure of the greatest expeditions in the annals of polar exploration. Roald Amundsen sailed from this elegant Scandinavian capital for his successful assault on the South Pole, in the same ship, the Fram, built by his mentor Fridtjof Nansen for Nansen's earlier death-defying attempt to reach the North Pole.


My buddy Roald's personal side street, named in his honor, with the National Theater in the background.