Guy Maddin’s Tales from the Gimli Hospital [Redux]

Who better than Guy Maddin to show us the early days of Canada’s healthcare system? Fittingly, they were quite absurdist and sometimes macabre. Gimli was constructed by Icelandic immigrants (much like Maddin’s own ancestors) on the shore of Lake Winnipeg in Manitoba. Around the turn of the 20^th Century, Gimli was fully staffed with nurses, yet Einar’s suffering really started when he was admitted. Once again, Maddin shows us the weirdness of Canada that never was but somehow has always been in the freshly restored Tales from the Gimli Hospital [Redux], which opens today in New York.

Like most vintage Maddin, Gimli is a nested tale, being told in the ostensive present day. In the modern, full-scale Gimli, Amma tries to console her grandchildren waiting by their mother’s deathbed, by telling them the wildly inappropriate story of “Einar the Lonely” and his “friend” Gunnar. Both contract smallpox, but the nurses in the clapboard Gimli Hospital (built above a stable, for the warmth of the animals) only have eyes for Gunnar. They are charmed by his gifts as a raconteur and his skill cutting fish from tree bark.

Frankly, it is like Einar does not even exist, which makes him even more feverish. However, it turns out they had good sense to ignore him, when Gunnar discovers his friend’s secret shame. It is so transgressive, it ignites a life-and-death wedgy-sumo battle between them.

Gimli was the film that made Maddin a cult sensation. It is short but it is packed with Maddinesque dreams and fantasias, as well as visual references ranging from “Our Gang” to German expressionism. There is also a restored scene that was cut from the 1988 theatrical version. Gimli is a trip, but it is still an early work and not the full-blown kaleidoscopes of his more recent masterworks, like The Forbidden Room, Seances, and My Winnipeg.

Guy Maddin’s The Green Fog

We tend to forget it was the ungrateful citizens of San Francisco whom Inspector “Dirty Harry” Callahan so diligently protected. That alone makes the Golden Gate City one of the leading movie towns for mystery-thrillers. Yet, it’s still not as ubiquitous as New York or LA, so it had just the right degree of difficulty for Guy Maddin. His latest film “rhapsody” consists of excerpts snipped from other films and TV shows shot on location in San Francisco, or the surrounding environs. Along the way, it also became a pseudo-remake of the SF-set Vertigo, in spirit, rather than the beat-for-beat narrative. San Francisco looks appealingly noir as it gets the Winnipeg treatment in Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson’s The Green Fog (trailer here) which opens this Friday at the IFC Center.

If you do not know Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Maddin’s Fog will most likely leave you thoroughly confused. By the way, you really ought to know it, but conveniently the IFC Center will present the two films together as a double-bill during select screenings. Regardless, there are plenty of men hanging off buildings, just like poor Jimmy Stewart. There are also quite a few femme fatales, very much in the Kim Novak tradition. To further reinforce the Hitchcockian connection, Jacob Garchik’s score, performed by the Kronos Quartet, doubles, triples, and quadruples down on Bernard Herrmann nervy jangliness.

Frankly, while watching Maddin’s pseudo-narrative montage, it makes you wonder why more productions do not more frequently take advantage of the city’s distinctive landmarks. Obviously, some films were enormously helpful to Maddin and company, including classics like Vertigo itself, Dark Passage, The Lady from Shanghai, Sudden Fear, The Towering Inferno, The House on Telegraph Hill, They Call Me Mr. Tibbs!, and the Dirty Harry series.

Perhaps not so surprisingly Jagged Edge and Philip Kaufman’s 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers turned out to be especially useful. Maybe the happiest surprise is how often Chuck Norris pops up in clips from An Eye for an Eye. There are also moments of high camp or nostalgia (take your pick) when the Winnipeg filmmakers mine unexpected vanes, such as McMillan & Wife and The Love Bug.

The Green Fog is definitely a film for film buffs. The right kind of viewer will have jolly good fun trying to I.D. each film fragment (double points to anyone who picks up on Mr. Ricco, which sadly does not include any of Chico Hamilton’s groovy soundtrack). Essentially, you can consider it the most idiosyncratic Chuck Workman film ever. Recommended for Maddin devotees and adventurous Hitchcock fans, The Green Fog (and Vertigo) open this Friday (1/5) in New York, at the IFC Center.

Tribeca ’16: Seances

Of all the inter-acty programs at this year’s Tribeca, you have to get behind this one, because it directly and necessarily led to the creation of Guy Maddin’s incomparable cinema fantasia The Forbidden Room. Originally, this was the interactive tribute to and resurrection of lost silent films Maddin had in mind, but a condition of his funding required the production of a conventional feature film as well. This is probably the only time Maddin’s Forbidden Room and the word “conventional” will ever appear in the same paragraph. Regardless, Maddin, Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson, and the National Film Board of Canada allow viewers the chance to invoke the spirits of some of the weirdest silent ever lost in Seances (trailer here), which concludes it viewing period today at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival.

Twelver viewers at a time enter the Seances booth, where they choose the elements of their film on the spiritualist’s table and then sit back to enjoy the show. After it concludes, the unique algorithm that produced the fifteen minute-ish short is deleted, so it can never be replayed. Much like Forbidden Room, Seances introduces an eccentric set of characters in the framing device that soon melts into some sort of flashback sequence, which is interrupted in turn by a Maddinesque flight of fancy, before repacking itself like a Russian doll.

After watched three in row at Tribeca, certain elements started to reappear, but scenes never repeated themselves. There are an awful lot of trippy, ghost films for participating viewers to draw from, featuring Maddin regulars like Geraldine Chaplin (who truly provides an apostolic link to the silent era), Mathieu Almaric, Maria de Medeiros, Charlotte Rampling, and the great Udo Kier. (In fact, the Seances producer seemed rather receptive to our suggestion for a special Udo Kier button, allowing each audience to vote yes or no whether they wanted some tasty Udo nuttiness in their film.)

Seances is wildly cool, but the VR-oriented Tribeca Festival Hub might not be the most sympathetic place to showcase it. There is just too great a disparity between the be-a-shark-in-the-ocean, be-a-lion-on-the-Serengeti VR programs and Seances, which offers patrons the chance to make their own unique Guy Maddin movie, especially if you are not already familiar with his work.

Be that as it may, Seances a characteristically visionary work from Maddin. Sly and surreal, it presents silent cinema like you have never seen it before. For instance, the assembled films all have sound. They also have macabre humor and an exceptional degree of artistry, most definitely including the work of cinematographers Stephanie Weber-Biron and Benjamin Kasulke. It always looks like a Maddin film, which means you might think it poured directly out of his subconscious. Highly recommended for multiple viewings, Seances is on view at the Festival Hub until 11:00 pm tonight (4/17), as a Storyscapes selection at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.

RIDM ’15: The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Maddin

Making a film about Guy Maddin is an intimidating prospect. There is no way you can get away with conventional talking heads when profiling arguably the most distinctive stylist in world cinema today. Fortunately, Yves Montmayeur recognized the challenge and brought his A-game for The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Maddin (trailer here), which screens today as part of the 2015 RIDM: Montreal International Documentary Festival.

Before going any further, fans should be duly reassured Udo Kier most definitely appears in 1,000 Eyes. It wouldn’t be a Maddin film without him. As the documentary opens, he and Geraldine Chaplin are participating in Maddin’s séance performance art-installation piece at the Pompidou Center. They are trying to raise the spirits of aborted films that were never produced. Maddin’s persistent fascination with films that never were has proved a rich vein for him to mine, also partly inspiring the mind-blowing The Forbidden Room.

Somewhat surprisingly, Montmayeur has a clear affinity for the more macabre aspects of Maddin’s films, which is not how most of his fans typically think of the surrealist. However, he also explores Maddin’s playfully transgressive sexual themes, which are always hard to lose sight of. Throughout the doc, Montmayeur shrewdly selects film clips for illustrative purposes. However, the auteur’s admirers will really respect the way Montmayeur manages to blend his documentary footage together with Maddin’s films and imagery in accordance the spirit of his subject’s visions. Maddin is also unceasingly helpful, talking seriously about his work, while maintaining a self-deprecating sense of humor. Maddin semi-regular Isabella Rossellini adds some star power, while John Waters and Kenneth Anger further bolster its cult appeal.

Although far from an exhaustive survey, Montmayeur paints a robust portrait of the filmmaker and the tone and motifs of his work. Maddin’s films are bizarrely seductive. Despite their often intentional fakeness, they somehow feel like a very real alternate reality. If you watch My Winnipeg, you will be convinced every strange and absurd story really happened in his Manitoba hometown. Montmayeur conveys a sense of the trippy, intoxicating power his best films have, which is quite an accomplishment. Running an economic sixty-five minutes, it delves reasonably deeply into the Maddin aesthetic without belaboring its points or repeating itself. Recommended for Maddin and Kier fans, The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Maddin screens today (11/20) and Sunday (11/22), as part of this year’s RIDM in Montreal.

Sundance ’15: The Forbidden Room

It is like Guy Maddin put his collection of vintage silent and early talky prints through a blender and then screened the puree, except none of these films ever existed before. Unlike his Séances project inspired by lost films, these odd (odd is indeed the right term) film fragments are entirely the product of Maddin, his co-writers: co-director Evan Johnson, poet John Ashbery, and co-conspirators Robert Kotyk and Kim Morgan. Yet, as is often true with Maddin’s work, they feel like they must be real on some alternate plane of existence. Prepare for a trip when Maddin’s The Forbidden Room screens during the 2015 Sundance Film Festival.

It is a tall order to summarize Room and it would be impossible to do the many plot strands justice. Just so you know you you’re in the right film (not that you couldn’t tell immediately), Room starts with a lesson on how to take a bath. It then segues into a submarine disaster film, which is interrupted by a woodsman, who has come to tell the suffocating crew his tale, as if he were the Ancient Mariner. Like Thomas Pynchon on speed, Room thus proceeds on tangents to tangents, as each flashback and incidental anecdote begets more of the same.

Eventually, we will meet Mathieu Amalric playing a collector who lives in a swanky elevator and the train psychiatrist working on the Berlin-Bogota Express. In one story arc, a man meets his doppelganger, while Udo Keir continually pops up as different characters in various sub-films, because he’s Udo Keir.

Trying to track the film from point A to point B is a losing proposition. It could almost play in a continual loop as an installation piece, except viewers would miss the realization of the moment Maddin opens up the final “Russian doll” (to use an apt term from the press notes) and begins to re-pack them again.

The real point of Room is the mind-blowing artistry of it all. Each constituent film begins with its own credits sequences, which are graphically striking and perfectly representative of their respective eras and genres. Likewise the work of cinematographers Stephanie Weber-Biron and Ben Kasulke is never less than stunning, flawlessly evoking the look of noir black-and-white as well as that early nitrate color. It really is like walking through a cinematic dreamscape.

Granted, Room will baffle less adventurous viewers, even though it has an excess of narrative coming out of its ears. This is truly Guy Maddin raised to the power of Guy Maddin. Without question, it is the work of a genuine auteur who has no close comparison. Highly recommended for fans of the unusual and the aesthetically daring, The Forbidden Room screens again tonight (10/29) and Saturday (1/31) in Park City, as part of this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Guy Maddin’s Keyhole

It was a dark and stormy life. Just as the Pick family was haunted by their psychological torments in life, so are they still in death. Yet, their gangster father Ulysses Pick has returned to his haunted home for a sort exorcism/intervention and perhaps a spot of redecorating in Guy Maddin’s Maddinesque Keyhole (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York at the IFC Center.

The police have the house surrounded, but the Pick Gang shoots their way in anyway, much to the consternation of his henchmen. Their griping means little to Pick, arriving through the backdoor with Denny, a waterlogged psychic, slung over his shoulder. She is to help him reach some sort of spiritual rapprochement with the ghost of his wife Hyacinth haunting the floor above with the spirit of her naked father chained to her bedpost.

To reach his wife Pick will have to pass through door after door of their Escher house, accompanied by Denny, while the dragging the man his gang just kidnapped, lashed securely to a chair. That would be Pick’s youngest son Manners, but some strange reason he does not recognize him as such, despite the efforts his increasingly restive men made to get him. Then things get a little surreal.

Keyhole is definitely a Guy Maddin film, which is cool, because the Canadian auteur might be the single most distinctive visual stylist working in film today. True, events in Keyhole do not always make strict logical sense, but it is consistently rewarding just watching Maddin subvert and reinvent the Old Dark House movie motifs. Even Manners Pick’s name pays homage to David Manners, the blue-blooded Canadian actor remembered as the ineffectual protagonist of Universal’s original Dracula and Mummy features.

Considering how important the look and atmosphere is to Keyhole’s overall viewing experience, Maddin’s’ gets some critical assists from his crew. Benjamin Kasulke’s shimmering black-and-white cinematography is quite Maddin-worthy, but also true to the wonderful 1930’s and 1940’s bump-in-the-night films that inspired Keyhole. Production designer Ricardo Alms and set decorator Matt Holm have also created a richly detailed and thoroughly spooky environment, generously appointed with Freudian knickknacks throughout.

Jason Patric plays the Homeric gangster with the perfect steely resolve and world-weary resignation. However, it is a bit difficult to see him and Isabella Rossellini as a couple, though their awkward chemistry is rather appropriate, given the dramatic context. Frankly, by its nature, Keyhole is not an actor’s film per se, largely using its supporting cast more as props than as flesh and blood characters. Yet, Brooke Palsson somehow conveys something human and vulnerable about Denny, before Maddin completely pulls the rug out from under everyone. To the joy of genre fans everywhere, Lars Von Trier and Uwe Boll regular Udo Kier is also on-hand, actually taking a straight and effective dramatic turn as the grieving Dr. Lemke.

If you like Maddin’s work (and you should), than you will like Keyhole. However, it is probably not the best starter film those previous unfamiliar with his bizarre quasi-genre fabulations (check out the often brilliant My Winnipeg first). Maddin is one of the few filmmakers with a genuinely unique vision and there are an awful lot of his visions in Keyhole. There is plenty of storyline as well, that is mostly linear and easy to follow, even if it does not completely fit together. Still, audiences should not sweat the details here. Keyhole is enthusiastically recommended to anyone looking to take a fever-trip on a cold winter’s night. A film for a real movie screen, Keyhole opens this Friday (4/6) in New York at the IFC Center.

LAFF ’10: The Night Mayor (short)

The nights in Canada get awfully long and dark. That is why Canadians were fascinated by the images generated by a Bosnian immigrant inventor who developed an experimental broadcasting system powered by the Aurora Borealis. Nihad Ademi’s fantastical story forms another chapter in director Guy Maddin’s secret history of his hometown of Winnipeg in the short film The Night Mayor, which screens during the 2010 Los Angeles Film Festival (and is also available for online viewing courtesy of the National Film Board of Canada).

A proud Canadian by choice, Ademi was captivated by the “music” of the Aurora Borealis. He invents the telemelodium, a machine that transformed the energy of the Northern Lights into sound and imagery. However, as more Canadians starting subscribing to his signals, the telemelodium started tapping into the countries subconscious, generating unexpected visuals, including that of Ademi’s daughter in her altogether. Despite Ademi’s patriotic motives, the national government is not happy to have this window opened into the Canadian soul.

Bearing the hallmarks of Maddin’s weirdly elegant style (glorious black-and-white, expressionist set pieces, unsettling music and audio effects), Mayor could easily be considered an addendum to his borderline brilliant feature My Winnipeg. However, where the full length film started with incidents in Maddin’s fictionalized and sensationalized history that seem eccentrically plausible, slowly but surely seducing viewers with its bizarre vision of the central Canadian city, Mayor’s improbability never convinces viewers to suspend their disbelief. Still, it is an undeniably original and more or less accessible bite of post-modern science fiction that should please Maddin’s loyal art-house fans.

Maddin is one of the few genuine auteurs working in film today. While his overall filmography is somewhat hit-or-miss, Mayor is an inventive and subversive short. Entertaining on its own, Mayor would probably be even more effective when viewed as a companion to Winnipeg. It screens at the LA Film Festival as part of Shorts Program 2 tomorrow (6/18) and Tuesday (6/22).

(Photo credit: Rebecca Sandulak)

Snowy, Sleep-Walking Winnipeg

It is not inappropriate that the production designer and cinematographer get their due before the actors in the opening credits of director Guy Maddin’s new so-called documentary. Maddin’s films have always reflected his distinctive style, but that keen visual sense is particularly effective in his bizarre love letter to his Manitoba hometown, My Winnipeg (trailer here).

Mixing fact and mostly fiction, with his own family history (the truth of which is anyone’s guess), Maddin creates a hypnotic vision of Winnipeg that is utterly convincing during the film, despite its highly stylized flights of fancy. When watching Winnipeg, you will believe that the city’s abnormally high rate of sleepwalking led to a municipal law requiring citizens to watch over somnambulists until they wake, should they let themselves into their former residences during their nocturnal ramblings.

In order to leave Winnipeg, Guy Maddin, played by Darcy Fehr, decides to cathartically recreate scenes from his childhood in the old family home. Playing Maddin’s supposedly real-life mother is cult-actress Ann Savage, best remembered for the cult-film Detour, in a performance that can only heighten her cult-following. However, the real star of Winnipeg is the deceptively prosaic Midwestern Canadian city itself.

North of Minnesota, but safely south of the Arctic, Winnipeg is portrayed as a mysterious city of perennial winter, taking on mystical power from its location near the geographic heart of the continent and the forks of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers. Maddin often uses the image of the forked rivers to compare Winnipeg to part of the female body (if you’re not getting the picture, I can’t help you). Winnipeg is full of such weird sexual images and representations, but it is not prurient, just idiosyncratic.

What is really seductive about Winnipeg is the secret history Maddin concocts, presumably, but which always seems oddly plausible somehow. We see a séance performed through interpretive dance in the provincial capitol building. We visit a Winnipeg make-out spot, “the horseheads,” formed when spooked horses were freakishly frozen solid in the river, as they stampeded away from a racetrack fire. We watch an episode of Ledge Man, Winnipeg’s only locally produced television show, naturally starring Maddin’s mother, as a woman who talks her suicidal son off the ledge every weekday afternoon.

Ironically, it is only when Maddin shows us something of Winnipeg that is obviously real, in this case the beloved old hockey stadium that was demolished and the new corporate-sponsored facility that replaced it, that the film becomes unconvincing. It jars us out of our sleep-walk through the city’s hidden back alleys with commonplace complaints about the evils of modernism and corporate development. Unlike the rest of Winnipeg, this is something we have seen before, frequently.

Production designer Rejean Labrie and DP Jody Shapiro do indeed deserve credit for transforming Winnipeg into a surreal Neverland. Aside from maybe the last ten minutes or so, Winnipeg is a very funny, thoroughly entertaining film that totally pulls the viewer into its alternate reality, regardless of the constraints of logic and common sense. It opens today in New York at the IFC Film Center.