Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988)

 

Director: Guy Maddin

Screenplay: Guy Maddin

Cast: Kyle McCulloch as Einar the Lonely, Michael Gottli as Gunnar; Angela Heck as Snjófridur; Margaret Anne MacLeod as Amma; Heather Neale as the Granddaughter; David Neale as the Grandson; Don Hewak as John Ramsay; Ron Eyolfson as Pastor Osbaldison; Chris Johnson as Dufferin; Donna Szöke as the Fish Princess

An Abstract List Candidate

 

Tales from the Gimli Hospital is a tale-within-tales, told by an Icelandic grandmother to her grandchildren on their mother's deathbed, when people scrubbed themselves with hay, and at a smallpox epidemic hospital, surgery is done with puppet shows than using anaesthesia. The first feature film by Guy Maddin, the legendary Canadian filmmaker, it feels like the first work from a director who would flesh out his career more as he went on, perfecting it. Like the ill-advised decision to have a blackface character, back when it was presumed to be ironic to comment on minstrel performances but still problematic, Tales from the Gimli Hospital does feel like a very early work from a director who, from his next Archangel (1990) onwards, would completely iron out and perfect his unique filmmaking style.

What Gimli is on inspection is Maddin tentatively making his steps into cinema, a cult film among those smaller budget genre movies made independently with no true discernible genre. Like those films, Maddin's unique personality is there immediately, and a thing to admire, but he was able to fully flesh out his aesthetic interests more as he went on. Here he is only flirting with his fascination with older art styles is cinema, silent cinema intertitles and coloured filtered the only touch stones to be found, Gimli follows a man named Einar the Lonely (Kyle McCulloch) who, in a community of Icelandic emigrants to Canada's outer wilds, is interred in a hospital during a small pox outbreak in the past. Canadian history becomes a pool for Guy Maddin's psychodramatic stories, and just plain weird imagery and behaviours as, meeting a rotund but loved fellow patient named Gunnar (Michael Gottli), who engages the female nurses and cuts out fish from tree bark to pass the time. Einar becomes jealous of his fellow patient's ability to interest the nurses. Sexually frustrated, neither does it help that when Gunnar reveals a tragic past of losing a woman he loved, who came to the small pox hospital with him and eventually succumbed whilst caring from him, Einar is involved in a way emphasising early how Maddin likes, even in seemingly jovial patsiches, to have dark humoured and transgressive content in his work.

Shot in grainy 16mm, Gimli already establishes the plot style of future Maddin films but is slighter, when other narratives became more grandiose and even over-the-top with the later productions. Gimli is a slight film just in length, only over an hour, and even against another short film of a similar length, Cowards Bend the Knee (2003), this could have been thinly spread if any longer whilst the later Maddin film was a psychodrama of strangeness that felt incredibly crammed into a similar length. This is an early work from Maddin, but the flirting of his creativity is here. The strange behaviours and sights, which casually appear and then vanish, of his characters make their appearance already, like surgical puppetry as mentioned, as does the fact large portions of his career are frankly about the neurosis of the heterosexual man. It is befitting he loosely remade Alfred Hitckcock's Vertigo (1958), with Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson, using existing footage from San Francisco made productions called The Green Fog (2017), as Maddin would probably be happy to admit his career has devoted large portions of itself (even scrutinising himself) about the neurosis and destructive natures of men in lust.

Here, the outcome breaks out in a man going blind due to emotional shock and, closer to the old silent films he is referring to, Einar stumbling on a fish queen preceding over a chorus of female dancers from children to grown women. To say that this is one of his weakest films for me is actually a virtue as, the first for Maddin as a feature length work, he starts well and would considerably improve upon this. The sense he was already progressing at this stage was with a fragment deleted from the film but remade into a short by itself, Hospital Fragment (2000). A surreal piece, of erotic desire encased within a secret space, of a nude man and woman housed in a small container looking out at bare-chested men slapping dead fish together, the woman entrapped in nets, an eruption of psychosexual intensity with the early use of Maddin of rapid editing that would come to his cinema alongside more techniques. Tales from the Gimli Hospital is a good film still, but the sense of it being a launching pad is also felt as, after, he would develop and grow more as a director significantly and immediately.

Abstract Spectrum: Strange

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None