S.S. Melies

[Heikki Raudaskoski]

It was Thursday morning last week. I was nervous as hell in a hotel room
in Helsinki. Desperately trying to cook up the ending paragraphs for a
paper on TRP to be given at a conference on North American Popular Culture. 
Two hours and I was to be on. And since I'm no good at improvisation, not
even in Finnish, I just threw the sheets unto the floor in frustrated anger,
about to give up, and switched on the TV. At that moment the European MTV
showed a video I'd never seen, "Tonight, Tonight" by Smashing Pumpkins. A
wonderful homage to the Georges Melies film _A Trip To The Moon_. Very
funny, very romantic. Moony. Carried out with a great sense of style. Yes,
you got it right, I suddenly found a secret supply of energy inside me,
wrote the bloody page which was necessary to make the talk passable, left
the hotel, and had just enough fuel in this newly found reserve to carry
through the performance. I also noticed -- and somebody must have pointed
to this already -- that the Rocket was there in the cinema, in this "dream
that we have together" as Cocteau put it, right from the start. From the
year 1902, at least. Admittedly, one cannot find much gravity in Melies.


Heikki