TALES FROM THE GIMLI HOSPITAL
Given the murky black-and-white photography, the fascination with repulsive medical details, the loony deadpan humor, the impoverished characters and settings, and the dreamlike drift of bizarre and affectless incidents, it’s difficult not to compare Tales From the Gimli Hospital with David Lynch’s Eraserhead. It’s also being distributed mainly (although not yet in Chicago) as a midnight attraction by Ben Barenholtz, the same man who launched Eraserhead on the midnight circuits a dozen years ago. Turning up here at the Film Center in Barbara Scharres’s “Films From the Lunatic Fringe” series, Tales From the Gimli Hospital isn’t an easy film to categorize, but invoking the name and weirdness of David Lynch gives you at least a rough idea of what to expect.
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I’ve been told that the independent film scene in Winnipeg consists of a lot more than Tales From the Gimli Hospital, but without having seen any samples, I can’t say how Maddin fits into this milieu. But he does claim that his feature was produced by Manitoba’s Extra Large Productions, a “Lockport-based film manufacturing company” established in 1910, which can certainly be linked to the movie’s ancient and otherworldly feel.
This history may be a total put-on–highly likely given the whimsical nature of the film itself, which wallows in ersatz Nordic folklore and local history –but if not, the company was started up again four years ago, and Maddin’s short The Dead Father and his subsequent feature are its first productions since the 20s. (The press kit also boasts that Tales From the Gimli Hospital is the first Extra Large production to cost over $5,000, which makes one wonder what could have induced the international film stars to turn up in the 20s.)
The next stage in the plot is a rather Woody Allen-ish comedy about deprived sexuality as Einar, feeling “invisible and mute” in relation to the nurses, who lavish all their attention on Gunnar, takes up “bark fish cutting and bark fish appreciation” as well as story telling, to little avail. Later, he and Gunnar each tell the other a story, and it emerges that they both concern the same maiden, Snjofridur (Angela Heck). In Gunnar’s story, he fell in love with Snjofridur, but, having been infected by the plague, passed his sickness on to her. On their wedding night he rejected her because of the sores the plague made on her body, and she died of a broken heart. In Einar’s story, he reveals that he came upon Snjofridur’s grave, stole all her burial tokens, and ravished her dead body. Eventually the two heroes wind up outdoors in a protracted and disgusting wrestling match as bagpipes play offscreen. Later, both cured of their illness, they emerge from the hospital to the strains of Mario Nascimbene’s score for the adventure epic The Vikings (1958).
