feature article: Embodying transnational shared space: Pirjo Honkasalo’s The 3 Rooms of Melancholia

Abstract

The article investigates the ways in which Pirjo Honkasalo’s documentary The 3 Rooms of Melancholia (2004), examining the impact of the Russian-Chechen war on children, engenders a transnational audience through cinematic qualities, and most importantly through embodiment, producing a strongly affective resonance in the spectator. I argue that through a strategically affective approach to transnationality, the documentary establishes what I call a transnational shared space, structured by a complex dialectics of sharing and non-sharing. My argument revolves around the concept of cinema as a shared space, referring to films that deliberately ‘surround’ the viewer rather than maintain a distance. As the analysis shows, Honkasalo’s documentary pushes the spectator to reflect critically on transnationality and reconsider mass media-created memory of the military conflict. The article addresses issues underlying the film’s ethical quest, such as whether this shared space involves both western (Catholic) and non-western (Orthodox and Muslim) audiences, and what the limits are of transnationalism in documentary film.

A transnational regioscape in the making. The Baltic Sea in Christian Petzold’s Barbara and Ilze Burkovska-Jacobsen’s My Favorite War

“…However, it is not only reiterated, but also employed to stage the Baltic Sea as a scene of an encounter between the Afghan refugees and the more privileged travellers, a group of tourists on a Norwegian cruise ship (stand-ins for those in the theatre audience who can identify with them). The encounter at the sea serves both to make viewers better understand the refugee experience and confront us with our own involvement in the so-called "refugee crisis" (see Mrozewicz 2023). Again, the Baltic Sea, by being staged as an inherently transnational body of wateras Stacy Alaimo has put it, "the deep seas epitomize how most ocean waters exist beyond state borders, legal protection, and cultural imaginaries" (2013:233)serves in Flee to question human-made borders as arbitrary, as well as the assumptions about who is "legal" and who is "illegal".…”