Suggested Viewing from

Jim's Real Detroit Column 2/23/2000

Born in 1956, Canadian director Guy Maddin’s pre-film life includes work as a bank teller and a house painter, as well as majoring in economics at the University of Winnipeg. His father, Charlie, was the business manager of Canada’s National Hockey Team. From these seemingly benign beginnings sprang a genius of avant-guard film, whose unequaled imagination has produced a volume of work that has played festivals around the world and received numerous awards. In 1995 he was received the Telluride Medal for Life Time Achievement, joining the ranks of such prestigious directors as Andrei Tarkovsky, Francis Ford Coppola, and Michael Powell. Despite the acclaim, the guy makes incredibly weird-ass films. His distinctive style combines elements of early cinematic masters like Murnau and Lang, mixes in a very small touch of David Lynch, and places them in a hell only Maddin could create. Although the subject matter itself is usually quite disturbing (his first film, the 1986 short The Dead Father, involves a dead man’s interaction with his still-alive family), it is the atmosphere that is the most unsettling.

A good place to start is Maddin’s second film, Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988). Maddin sets his story in the real-life village of Gimli on Lake Winnipeg. Fisherman Einar (Kyle McCullough) becomes sickly and heads for the filthy and overcrowded Gimli Hospital. He befriends Gunnar (Michael Gottli), a charming and similarly infected storyteller whose natural charm garners the attentions of all the nurses. Whatever friendship might have been is soon replaced by a bitter rivalry when Gunnar realizes that Einar has had his way with the corpse of Gunnar’s wife. In the weirdest sequence of the film Gunnar and Einar engage in a nasty and bloody wrestling match where they brutally pinch each other’s buttocks.

The original script for Tales from the Gimli Hospital called for a 40-minute film, but producer Greg Klymkiw convinced Maddin to expand it to feature length. There isn’t really much plot--definitely not what you’d expect in a full-length film. But every scene is interesting, filled with either unusual behavior and/or humor. The visuals are nothing short of hypnotic, making use of sets built by the natives of Gimli, superimpositions, and sometimes what looks like stock footage. Most likely because of the shared use of black and white, some have said that watching Gimli is reminiscent of Eraserhead. Instead, I found myself thinking that the movie could not have been made in the 80s, that it had to have been made 50 years ago--but somehow experimental, even today.

People often compare Gimli to Eraserhead (1978) another surrealistic latter-day black-and-white film. But I think Gimli’s visual style would be more in place on a double bill with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or some other early expressionistic work.

Archives

Comments or Questions? Send Jim an E-mail