Exclusive: Nils Gaup Talks Art, Corruption, and Nordic Drama

The Oscar-nominated director Nils Gaup has been making acclaimed Norwegian films for 35 years now, from Pathfinder to The Last King (with a detour through Hollywood with his English-language debut feature, the James Caan film North Star). His new film, Images of a Nordic Drama, is a first for the director, though — it’s a documentary.

While Norwegian history and historical fiction regarding the Sami people has always been a subject for Gaup, this documentary investigates a different sort of true story. It’s the remarkable tale of an unknown artist, Aksel Waldemar Johannessen, and the discovery of a treasure trove of his truly unique paintings stored away in a barn. A century after the artist’s death, a fervent art collector named Haakon Mehren devotes his twilight years to finally getting Johannessen the recognition he deserves.

Images of a Nordic Drama

Gaup patiently documents Mehren’s quest, and along the way, Images of a Nordic Drama details the intricacies and prejudices of the art world with quiet finesse. The film not only details the current art scene, but also the century of elitism that has produced it. Johannessen’s work does not fit in with the more intellectual, polished, or trendy art that gets fawned over; rather, his is described by art historians in the film as “anarchistic,” an aesthetic that offended the bourgeois sensibilities of the elites in the art world. In one way, Johannessen fits nicely into Gaup’s filmography, which is brimming with proletariat heroes and acts of revolution and rebellion against corrupt authorities; in another sense, the film’s an outlier.

“I never made a documentary before,” Gaup says, and jokes, “I thought that making a documentary must be very easy. So I found out that the opposite is true. Making features is easy because you can plan everything. Like the movie I’m shooting now, I know that I’m going to shoot for like, two months, and that’s it. I thought that shooting this documentary would take a couple of months. That was my plan, and it turned out to be wrong because I shot the movie for five years, and then edited and shopped it, and it was a never-ending story.”

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“It’s obviously a frustrating thing,” Gaup says, and he’s right — a scripted narrative film has an end in sight, but there are more limits of control in a documentary, considering that life has a tendency to surprise in unexpected ways. When do real-life stories actually end? “Now I know what a struggle and how hard it is, I know that [Gaup and the crew] have to be there all the time and never really relax. They have to be on on on the move all the time, in case anything happens, they have to be together and go very fast.”

Mehren and Johannessen Against the Elitists

Nonetheless, Gaup was inspired to pursue the fate of Waldemar Johannessen’s art ever since he first laid eyes on the paintings. He was actually doing research for a horror film and seeking out different images when he came across the bleak, strange work of the artist. “I saw the pictures in Vienna,” Gaup says, “They don’t give you a good feeling. They give you some strange, uncomfortable feeling, and that is what horror is all about. So I was trying to learn about this painter I never had heard of because he was Norwegian and I know most painters in Norway.” Gaup got in contact with the museum, which couldn’t give him much information more than the name and number of Haakon Mehren, the one man who could tell him more.

“He told us the story, and I think that it was amazing,” Gaup says. Mehren is a unique and fascinating “main character,” as Gaup calls him, an aging man with a great determination to introduce Waldemar Johannessen’s art to the world, as if he must complete this act of artistic immortality before he passes, as well. He’s a walking contradiction in many ways, a passionate but reserved man, someone who owns what could be very lucrative property in some beautiful forests but preserves everything with care, refusing to give in to profits by hurting the environment. “It’s his personality,” Gaup says, “an extremely old-fashioned and conservative person, but at the same time, he is also modern, because he doesn’t want to destroy the landscape or the globe.”

“I can’t believe it, all the struggle that he’s been doing for like 20 years, and the whole reality of the art business in Norway,” Gaup explains, and his film is an excellent primer on the art world and its intersection with capitalism and corruption. “Norway is supposed to be like a clean country, and I’ve found so much corruption. You know, if you have enough money, you can do anything you want. But if you don’t, all doors are closed.” Waldemar Johannessen was not someone with money, and he refused to paint profitable things.

Most of the Norwegian painters are painting very nice pictures, very nice paintings, because of a lot of rich people like those […] and Waldemar Johannessen didn’t do that, he couldn’t, he didn’t want to paint something that he didn’t believe in. He was a proletarian man, very, very poor. So he painted the world that he could see around him, and that wasn’t very nice, and that was reality for most of the people in Norway. He wanted to paint the reality, but nobody would like to buy that. Rich people want to have nice paintings on the wall.

Investigating What (and Who) Art is For

Really, the conflict between Johannessen (and Mehren) and the art world is essentially the same conversations artists and producers have today about film and television — should movies always be entertaining? Is escapism preferable to realism? Why is it important to make films about everyday people having everyday struggles, rather than watching people in costumes fly around and punch each other? Is there a difference?

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Obviously, a Marvel film will receive exponentially more funding than a gritty drama about a drug user raising her young child, for instance, and the franchise culture of the former easily obfuscates and edges out the latter. Gaup, though, sees in Johannessen’s paintings the kinds of stories that the 99% can relate to, and that indict the wealthy elite. These stories are important to him.

In the old days, there’s a story in the pictures […] One of my favorites [of Johannessen] has two paintings in the same frame. Where you can see in the one painting small children, three children alone in the apartment during nighttime, and the other one has a woman standing outside waiting for customers. So the story as I interpret its is like this: a woman with three kids, she doesn’t have money to feed them, she has to sell her body to do that. That was reality in Norway at that time, and that was the thing that he wanted to tell. It’s a sad story. It’s not a nice story, but it’s part of our story and part of the reality that people have experienced.

Art, for some people, is mutually exclusive from reality. As such, Mehren’s quest is long and arduous, but Gaup’s camera and crew were there to document it for five important years. Images of a Nordic Drama is a part of the Hot Docs 2022 festival in Toronto; it’s next public screening is on Thursday, May 5 at 8:45 pm, at Varsity 8 (55 Bloor Street West), but it is also streaming as part of the online festival access. You can find more information here.

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