Oslo On-Screen

Comment - Hanna C. Nes

With barely 24 hours in the city under my belt and a penchant for romanticizing my surroundings, getting to know Oslo through film allowed me to find my special places in a city I barely knew.

The Worst Person in the World. Directed by Joachim Trier. Produced by Oslo Pictures. (Screenshot via CRAVE)

Have you ever watched your neighbourhood get blocked off for filming?

Trailers line the streets nearby. Paper notices with shooting dates shoved in mailboxes. Kids on bicycles crane their necks to get a peek at whichever movie stars are there. I remember when the trailer for Beau is Afraid came out and every Montreal based publication scrambled to draw up an article about how it was indeed filmed there as if this was some point of pride despite the film’s narrative not taking place in the city. It’s an odd experience watching “your city” onscreen. It’s never really your city. It’s always an uncanny, warped version where fictional storefronts are propped on top of the ones you walk by daily. It’s gone through several colour grading sessions that have rendered it to a shade you’ve never seen with your own eyes.

Oslo isn’t necessarily regarded as a popular cinematic subject. Of the few films set in the city, Joachim Trier and Eskil Vogt are probably collectively responsible for a substantial number of them. With their numerous efforts, SKAM’s immense impact on teen culture, and films like Syk Pike gaining international distribution, more audiences are getting a glimpse of the city, albeit through a screen (Tenet doesn’t count, guys).

I accepted my offer to UiO last year after having spent approximately 14 hours in Oslo (including a very bad nap on a bench in Cinemateket) in late 2018. Upon confirming my attendance, I realized I was barely familiar with the city, despite having spent many summers visiting family in other parts of Norway. The decision was spurred by a craving for both a sense of home and newness. Oslo was somewhere that hinted at a fresh start and also scratched at the itch of childhood memories that lay buried deep.

Having only seen Oslo in all its seasonal iterations through a screen, I clung to my many rewatches of SKAM and The Worst Person in the World as a guide to settling into my new home. The benches at St. Hanshaugen became a pilgrimage, the corner in Gamlebyen a site of contemplation, and the hum of Akerselva a soundtrack. I guess when you barely know anyone in a new city, the characters and scenes that you’ve religiously ingested keep you company in the spaces you visit. Slowly over time, as you begin to have your own experiences in those places, you collapse together all the emotions from both fact and fiction. I kissed at the bench. I laughed at the bench. I yelled at the bench. I cried at the bench. I stood at the corner. I drank coffee at the corner. I nearly walked into oncoming traffic at the corner. I wandered up and down Akerselva every day, noting how many ducks were quacking at the river bend and the number of babies passing by in strollers.

André Aciman, author of Call Me By Your Name, wrote a piece (the name of which inspired this one) about roaming New York’s Upper West Side after a screening of Billy Wilder’s The Apartment. Emerging from the cinema nearly 25 years after the movie was initially released, Aciman wanders the dimly lit streets at night. 

“Without knowing it, I was headed on an improvised pilgrimage, the sort that many people take when they travel to the site of a film or of a novel they’ve loved and whose resonance continues to hover over their lives, almost beckoning them to slip into a world that suddenly feels more real and far more compelling than their own. It’s not just that they want the movie to stay with them indefinitely, they want to borrow the lives of its characters—because they want the story to happen to them, or better yet, the film feels as though it has already happened to them and what they’re asking the site to do for them is to help them relive what they’ve just lived through on-screen”

What he finds isn’t the apartment in question or any of the locations that Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine ran around in 1960. Instead, he finds that the Upper West Side of The Apartment has disappeared into the ether, a mere lingering memory of a bygone era, a city that revamps itself every few years yet brims with nostalgia.

Wandering the streets of Oslo with mainly a list of shooting locations to serve as my compass, I was happy to find that everything was intact, that the idea of Oslo in my romanticized movie mind wasn’t far off from reality. The city’s pastel buildings and greenery flourished before me, just as it had on film. Vigelandsparken and all its statues were still there. The sun still shimmered atop the waves by Aker Brygge. Ekebergparken still loomed above, providing a vast view of the sprawling neighbourhoods. Tying all the scenes from films and shows I had dutifully watched allowed me to instil a sense of significance to a place I technically barely knew. It allowed me to anchor myself. The bench became my special place, one that I took people I thought were worthy enough to share it with. If it was so monumental in The Worst Person in the World maybe it could be monumental to me.

A friend from Canada visited me for a few days in late April, luckily catching the week of clear blue skies and 20 degree weather. It took wandering my neighbourhood, Grønland, with a pair of fresh eyes for us to realize I lived beside a pivotal scene between SKAM’s Isak and Even. 18 year old me would have been amazed. As we walked up to the benches in St. Hanshaugen, a crowd of russ-students formed a sea of red in their jumpsuits. My friend, looking out at the skyline and taking in the dozens of day drunk teenagers, turned to me excitedly: “Wow, SKAM is real!”