KON-TIKI (Expedição Kon Tiki) B
Norway Denmark Great Britain Germany (118 mi) 2012 ‘Scope d: Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg Official site [no]
Norwegian explorer Thor
Heyerdahl filmed his own epic 4300 mile crossing of the Pacific Ocean on a
balsa wood raft in 1947, turning it into a 77-minute documentary film KON-TIKI
(1950), winning the Academy Award for Best Documentary Film in 1951, where
interestingly a young Louis Malle beautifully documented the ocean expeditions
by Jacques Cousteau in A SILENT WORLD (1956) to win another Best Documentary
Award in 1957, so gloriously photographed ocean exploration was a peculiar
fascination of the world in the 1950’s. More
than a half a century later, this new Norwegian film by the same name received
the first ever Norwegian Golden Globe nomination and was among the 5 nominated
films for Best Foreign Film, eventually won by the heavily favored Cannes
winner Amour
(Love) (2012), where it was the highest-grossing film of 2012 in Norway and
at $16 million dollars the country's most expensive production to date. As might be expected, the film is a sprawling
epic actually spoken in English, simultaneously shooting on alternate days another
version in Norwegian, where the sumptuous cinematography by Geir Hartly
Andreassen is an essential component to the movie experience. Shooting two film versions was a common
practice during the transition from Silent to talking motion pictures in the early
1930’s, but few movies have maintained a lasting value, the exception being
Josef von Sternberg’s DER BLAUE ENGEL in 1930, the first major German sound
film that turned a young Marlene Dietrich into an international star, released
in a 124-minute German version, while THE BLUE ANGEL, the alternate language
English version, initially thought lost, but recently discovered in a German
film archive and restored in 2009, used quicker cuts and was only 100-minutes,
where we’ll perhaps never know if this was the director’s intent, or purely
accidental. Jean Renoir’s THE GOLDEN
COACH (1953), starring Italian actress Anna Magnani, shot at the Cinecittà
Italian studio with a largely Italian cast, was shot separately in English,
Italian, and French versions, while Werner Herzog’s NOSFERATU THE VAMPYRE
(1979) was shot in both German and English versions. Dubbing is a common practice that avoids the
expense of double shooting, but it’s impossible to get the language
synchronized with the mouth movements. The point here is that double shooting
into multiple languages is a rare occurrence, but parallels the practice of
translating books into different languages, where Heyerdahl wrote a book in 1948
about the expedition, The Kon-Tiki
Expedition: By Raft Across the South Seas, which sold out in fifteen days
before it was translated into 70 languages and sold more than 50 millions
copies around the world.
If you want to know who’s responsible for the proliferation
of all those Polynesian South Sea island adorned Tiki bars featuring exotic
rum-flavored tropical drinks garnished with fruit and toothpicked umbrellas on
top, featuring names like Zombies, Singapore Sling, Scorpion, and Mai Tai’s that
sneak up on you before they knock you on your ass, not to mention indoor
waterfalls and pools, plastic palm trees, fire torches, and a collection of
mask carvings of various Tiki gods—well it’s this guy, Thor Heyerdahl and his
mad adventure across the globe, like a veritable Richard Halliburton
experience. A folk hero in his homeland,
Heyerdahl was nothing if not a public relations genius, way ahead of his time in
understanding the power of the media and how he could leverage his adventure
into money and fame. While it’s a shame
he could not be played by Klaus Kinski, with that look of demented messianic
madness in his eye that he displays in Herzog’s AGUIRRE: THE WRATH OF GOD (1972), where he would
rather die than be proven wrong, stubbornly risking his life and those of his
crew on an unsubstantiated theory, the film stars Pål Sverre Valheim Hagen as
Thor Heyerdahl, seen in the idyllic opening scenes with his wife Agnes
Kittelsen from Happy
Happy (Sykt Lykkelig) (2010), as they bathe naked under natural waterfalls
and frolic among the natives on a Polynesian island, spending ten years there
as a natural scientist. It was there
that he developed his thesis that the Polynesian islands were populated largely
from the East and from South America, where despite the distance, boats would
be flowing with the current, rather than the prevailing theory that the islands
were populated from Asia, where boats would have to struggle against the
current. Heyerdahl encountered a brick
wall when attempting to sell his story with the publishing houses in New York,
as the prevailing scientific community found the idea preposterous, suggesting
he would have to conduct the voyage himself to prove it could be done before
anyone would believe him. So that’s
exactly what he decided to do, calling his wife in Norway from New York to
inform her he was going to have to miss Christmas with the two kids this year,
as he was flying instead to South America to embark upon a voyage on a
primitive raft across the Pacific Ocean to prove a point, and that he’d call
her three or four months later once he’d landed. That’s the way they did it in the old days,
where everything was about proving a point.
So of course this dashingly handsome, blond-haired, blue-eyed
reincarnate of Peter O’Toole in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962) shows his headstrong
invincibility by accepting the challenge, running off to Peru to build his raft
with all home-grown materials, while assembling a crew of 6 men, all Norwegian
except one Swede, and a pet parrot.
While the raft was built using only the materials and
technologies available to people in pre-Columbian
times, they also brought along with them some modern equipment, such as a
radio, watches, charts, sextant, and metal knives, where Heyerdahl argued they
were incidental to the purpose of proving that the raft itself could make the
journey. There’s a surprising amount of
tension early on when the raft appears to be drifting towards the Galapagos
Islands, too far north to catch the South Equatorial Current needed to carry
them to their destination, also increasing doubt about whether they could
actually pull this off, as any number of questions about the raft’s durability
just couldn’t be answered. Heyerdahl
insisted all was well in his telegraphed reports and that morale was high even
as the threat of mutiny crept into his crew, led by an engineer forced to work
in the refrigerator business, off on his first adventure, whose scientific
queries led to Heyerdahl’s unscientific response that they would have to rely
upon faith, not exactly a comforting answer.
All the disasters seem to occur early on, where giant whales swim
directly under their raft which could easily tip over, or erupting storms
create horrific wind gales that nearly throw them all into the drink. The aforementioned engineer, bloodsoaked from
carving up a captured shark, then takes a spill into the ocean with circling
sharks, where the blood has driven them into a frenzy, yet he is miraculously
saved by one of the other crew members who risks his own life. So there is plenty of heroism on display, but
nothing expresses their collective joy of relief as the realization that they
have caught the boundary current and are oncourse, as a certain idleness sets in
where time ceases to matter, as Heyerdahl continuously sends a volley of
telegraph messages imploring the success of the mission, turning him into an international celebrity while he
was still at sea. To the ethereal music
by Johan Söderqvist, there is a centerpiece spectacular shot that takes the
viewer on a close-up view of the raft in the vast ocean, pulling back farther
until it can still be seen below the clouds, pulling farther back until you are
literally out of the stratosphere and into outer space, shifting
the focus of the camera to the celestial bodies and other galaxies of the
universe before returning the shot back down to the isolated raft surrounded by
this immense ocean—easily the shot of the film, changing the perspective of the
entire experience into something of an accomplishment that will live in
time immemorial. The film was shot in eight different countries over the
course of three and a half months, trying to shoot as much as possible on the
open seas, most of it near Malta, minimalizing the use of a large water tank,
as despite plentiful use of computer graphic effects, this strengthens the overall
look of authenticity. While scientists
continue to doubt Heyerdahl’s theory, and even his role as a scientist, he is
one of the first modern era adventurists to capture the world’s imagination by
recounting his experiences as they were happening, something even astronauts
continue to do from outer space.
Interestingly, on April 28, 2006, another Norwegian team, which included
Heyerdahl’s grandson Olav, successfully duplicated the Kon-Tiki voyage using a
similarly built raft, known as the Tangaroa Expedition, including modern
navigation and communication equipment, even solar panels and computer
equipment, maintaining constant postings on their website, some of which is
recorded here Tangaroa
Expedition English! by Fredrik Dahl on Prezi.
