[Thor Joachim Haga]

A discussion on FSM, about what you got into first – films or music – made me wax nostalgic again.

I think every single person on the planet was exposed to music first, from your mother singing you to sleep with lullabies. In fact, we’ve probably interacted with music before we have any memory of ourselves. Like a toddler jumping up and down to a beat-filled tune. So music definitely came first for me, although I have very few, if any, memories of the 70s.

Then came television – Barne-TV (Children’s TV), as we call it. It’s institutionalized over here, at a time in the early 80s when we only had one TV channel in Norway. Maybe with a splattering of children’s programmes on radio. But rather than radio, I preferred listening to our 3-4 children’s records over and over again, to my parents’ dismay.

I can’t say for certain what my first film experience was, but I have a fleeting memory of a scene….the scary Katla the Dragon scene in Astrid Lindgren’s BRØDRENE LØVEHJERTE (THE BROTHERS LIONHEART), the film version from 1977. This was probably adapted to series format on TV in….let’s say 1981 or 1982, when I was four or five years old. But it still qualifies as a film.

I have no idea what my first cinema experience was, but it was no doubt in the first half of the 80s. Possibly some old Tarzan film with Johnny Weissmüller, some animated thing, whatever. After that, it becomes easier to track.