Tales from the Gimli Hospital

🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿

🎙️ EPISODE 600: 11.17.22 🇨🇦 𝙿𝙰𝚁𝚃 𝙾𝙵 𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝙳𝙸𝚁𝙴𝙲𝚃𝙾𝚁 𝙵𝙾𝙲𝚄𝚂 𝙾𝙽 𝙶𝚄𝚈 𝙼𝙰𝙳𝙳𝙸𝙽 🇨🇦 I will be assigning no genre tags to my film critiques of Mr. Guy Maddin. As I did with my Neil Breen Director Focus. These are auteurs whose work defies categorization. And yes, comparing the two is asinine. But that's sort of the point. That's the joke. Haha? Having just wrapped up my D.F. on the great Peter Greenaway, I thought it would be fitting to return to a similar well of inspiration. Alongside a showing of his masterpiece Drowning by Numbers, I had the pleasure of viewing Maddin's The Saddest Music in the World (2003) in a film class at Rutgers. It was another transformative moment in my ascent (descent?) into the realms of the film buff.

So I thought what better way to kick off the next hundred episodes of this dumb show that I do for some ungodly reason than with a chronological run-through of the work of a Canadian maniac who has an an unhealthy obsession with the silent film era? And so here we are. Truth be told, I am not at all familiar with any of his work pre-Saddest Music, so all of these first six features are going to be fresh and new for me. (I plan on doing a Select Short Films episode on Maddin at some point down the line; his catalog in that department is extensive, to say the least).

Perhaps more than any singular artist I've reviewed, Maddin's overall aesthetic will be the biggest barrier for the average moviegoer. While this debut is not explicitly a silent film (he'll go onto make those later), this movie and all of his films, to a degree, ape the style and tropes and techniques of that era (late 1800s-1920s) and also the subsequent development of "talkies" and sound cinema (late 20s and onward), which morphed into, more or less, what films look and feel like today. I think it's in that "morphing" which Maddin is most obsessed with, tactically-speaking. He isn't trying to remake a movie from the 1920s as much as he's trying to use that style as a mold to do something new.

And aesthetics aside, his skill as a writer should not be shortchanged. His films are an exquisite mix of the personal and detached, a blending of history from in and around his native Winnipeg with a stilted, esoteric weirdness that, at times, feels impossible to pin down (in the best possible way). Take Gimli for example. At once a peculiar nod to a town in Manitoba and the dawn of its Icelandic heritage, settled in 1875. And also a somewhat asinine tale about jealousy and smallpox and male rivalry and fishing. The very idea that THIS is the tale being told by a grandmother to two young children as their mother lays near death in a present-day hospital bed is pure absurdism. Maddin always has something to say but he's going to say it and frame it in the strangest manner imaginable.

It's intentionally scattered feeling, but if you can get past the confusion it's truly exhilarating. There is something magnificently simple about all this weirdness when you strip it to its core. And even if you can't, try simply accepting that this makes sense to one man and, sometimes, that's all that matters.

CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 599 - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 601 ⫸

---

Tales from the Gimli Hospital is a 1988 film directed by Guy Maddin. His feature film debut, it was his second film after the short The Dead Father. Tales from the Gimli Hospital was shot in black and white on 16 mm film and stars Kyle McCulloch as Einar, a lonely fisherman who contracts smallpox and begins to compete with another patient, Gunnar (played by Michael Gottli) for the attention of the young nurses. It was released on October 3, 1988.