LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Guy Maddin: Gimli Hospital
built 220 days ago
Maddin's films hearken to the primordial days of cinema. Maddin shot his first feature, TALES FROM THE GIMLI HOSPITAL, primarily as a silent film. Described by Maddin as "a tone poem in tribute to ambient crackle," GIMLI is a beautiful tale of rivalry and pestilence.
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Wisely, Maddin took his time while making Tales from the Gimli Hospital. More than 18 months passed between the writing of the film, the shooting of the film, and the eventual post-production and distribution on the film, but by all accounts, the resulting work made it worth it. With his first feature, not only did Maddin realize his goal of standing out as a unique voice within the Manitoba film industry, as well as an especially unique member of The Winnipeg Film Group, an arts co-operative that had gotten Paizs' career started a few years before Maddin's, but he ... managed to find an enthusiastic audience waiting in New York's underground film scene, thanks in large part to the help of Greg Klymkiw, who immediately saw cult potential for the film. And so, Tales from the Gimli Hospital would play for years in New York City, as pockets of cinephiles anticipated what Maddin would do next.
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Even with Maddin’s status as festival poster boy and his recent critical accolades, an element which separates Maddin from the “big boys” is the nature of his career path. Maddin’s formats of choice are super 8mm, 16mm, and Super 16mm, and has shot on 35mm only once so far, on Twilight of the Ice Nympth. Maddin may be best known for his five theatrical features (Tales From the Gimli Hospital, Archangel, Careful, Twilight of the Ice Nympths, and The Saddest Music in the World), but he has made over twenty shorts, including documentaries (BBB 1990), docu-dramas (Indigo High –Hatters 1991), television shows (The Hands of Ida 1995), ‘remakes’ (The Hoyden 1998, a condensed version of Eric
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For his first feature outing, Canadian-born Maddin stuck close to home. The imaginary ward in Tales from the Gimli Hospital (SFIFF 1989) lies amidst the grey village of Gimli, an isolated outpost of forlorn fishermen somewhere north of Winnipeg. Using a tackle box of visual lures from Carl Dreyer, David Lynch and George Kuchar, Gimli is a fishy concoction of Scandinavian folklore. Suspended in what seems a fantastical snow globe, Archangel (1990), Maddin's next feature (written with his lifelong collaborator, the indubitable George Toles), conjures a perpetual present of dreamlike warfare as German, Russian and Allied soldiers swarm across the countryside, circa 1918. Interrupted only by ironic intertitles, Archangel is a triumph of sardonic circularity in which identity is continually reinvented in a roundelay of gas-induced memory loss.
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Since the premiere of his first feature Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988), Maddin has been astounding audiences with his eccentric, confounding and stunningly beautiful work. His films include Archangel (1992); Careful (1993); Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1995); Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary (2002); and The Saddest Music in the World (2003).
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Plus It’s a Wonderful Life, a music video Maddin made for the American rock band Sparklehorse. (2001. 3 mins.) Plus Hospital Fragment, an impressionist series of images inspired by Tales from the Gimli Hospital. (1999. 3 mins.)
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