What are the attributes of this brave new cinematic world that we supposedly live in now, all cell-phones and YouTube? I’d propose the following as the key recurring topics in most discourse about cinema’s technological shift: (1) the dissolution of the distinctions between film and video; (2) a freedom to move beyond conventional narrative, a freedom that results from the low cost of new technology; and (3) a newly nomadic globalism, as images are made and distributed more easily than ever. If I may be forgiven a momentary, grouchy digression, I hardly think I am going out on a limb when I say that the work that has come to define this shift is not exactly visionary. I confess that I find viral videos of young Russian men doing deranged ‘street gymnastics’ oddly addictive, but if this is the way forward for cinema (and it basically fits all three of the categories I just named), I’m switching back to literature. I take comfort, though, in the thought that this is not really the future, or not the only one, anyway. Pirjo Honkasalo’s 2004 film The 3 Rooms of Melancholia is the future too.
Even though it won a lot of film-festival awards (and had its US premiere at Sundance), the film is not well known. Honkasalo is a Finnish documentarian who has been working for several decades now, and while she’s well-respected in European documentary circles, her films don’t circulate very widely outside of television and festivals. She is, in many ways, a seminally European kind of filmmaker; she has worked steadily for many years, has maintained a fair bit of independence, and has been able, every once in a while, to make a major contribution that moves the art forward. The 3 Rooms of Melancholia is such a contribution.