The documentary Helsinki, Forever, showing tonight and Sunday at the Northwest Film Forum, opens on an unforgettable long-ago scene. A large ship smashes through thick Baltic ice while citydwellers in bowlers, greatcoats, knickers, and long skirts amble and caper blithely beside it, as though out for a stroll on an ordinary street. A car crosses the icebreaker’s path. It’s Helsinki, Forever’s high point, a priceless surreal image expressing the tenuous, outpost status of a modern capital on Europe’s far northeast edge.

Peter von Bagh explores that urban paradox in a meditative essay voiced over what seems like snatches of everything ever filmed in Helsinki. Von Bagh is ex-director of Finland’s national film archive, and Helsinki, Forever is as much a history of Finnish cinema as a history of Finland on film. Endless bustling street scenes (minus icebreaker) intersect with newsreels, home movies, and clips from old thrillers and romcoms and Aki Kaurismaki’s Jarmusch-like deadpan drolleries. Cherished old buildings get leveled and stark new ones go up. Civil war and world war punctuate the country’s fabled cozy tranquility.

Von Bagh’s elliptical approach recalls Chris Marker’s globe-wandering Sans Soleil, but Von Bagh focuses relentlessly on a city he and his intended audience know intimately. Names and allusions drift dreamily by (even for one who’s spent time in Finland, as I have). But Helsinki, Forever’s an intriguing model of how cinematic collage can capture a city. Who knows what strange footage lurks in Seattle’s vaults?

Package Deals: Finland

Preceding Helsinki, Forever at 5:30pm, this grab bag of Finnish experimental shorts and music videos affords a fractured inside view of a contemporary culture at once remote and cosmopolitan. Some pieces are plainly student efforts. The package’s best part is the last, "English Lessons," a wild collaborative riff on a 1970s language tape. Monty Python meets English As She Is Spoke.

From the Land of the Midnight Sun at Northwest Film Forum, July 17-18:
Package Deals: Finland, 5:30pm
Helsinki, Forever by Peter von Bagh, 7pm
Living Room of the Nation by Jukka Kärkkäinen, 8pm
Calamari Union by Richard Lefebvre (after Aki Kaurismaki), 10pm