Eyes of Laura Mars is part of fashionable Machine Dazzle film series at MAD
Who:Machine Dazzle What:Movie Night with Machine Where: The Theater at MAD, Museum of Arts & Design, 2 Columbus Circle at 58th St. & Eighth Ave. When: October 25 & 27, December 20, January 10, $10, 7:00 Why: Walking around the Museum of Arts and Design exhibition “Queer Maximalism x Machine Dazzle” is like wandering through a glorious movie set, with colorful costumes and artworks that tell one heckuva bizarre story; you fully expect the mannequins to suddenly come to life and enter this surreal world. The retrospective of the work of performance artist Machine Dazzle, on view through February 19, is supplemented with a film series hosted by the queer experimental theater genius, born Matthew Flower in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, in 1972, consisting of movies that influenced him as a child of the 1970s and ’80s. It kicked off October 13 with the epic Clash of the Titans and continues October 25 with Robert Wise’s underrated Star Trek: The Motion Picture (can’t wait to hear what Machine will have to say about the Federation uniforms!) and October 27 with Irvin Kershner’s tense neo-noir thriller Eyes of Laura Mars, about a glamorous fashion photographer who is being stalked by a serial killer; the cast includes Faye Dunaway, Tommy Lee Jones, Brad Dourif, René Auberjonois, and Raúl Juliá, and one scene takes place in Columbus Circle, where the museum moved in 2008.
Machine will be on hand to introduce the screening and participate in a discussion afterward; it should be too much fun listening to him talk about the costumes and scenery, and there will be giveaways, costume contests, custom-designed step-and-repeats, photoshoots, and other cool stuff. Be sure to come back December 20 for Robert Greenwald’s Xanadu, when we can all pay tribute to the late Olivia Newton-John and celebrate Machine’s fiftieth birthday, followed January 10 by Guy Hamilton’s Agatha Christie adaptation Evil Under the Sun, featuring Peter Ustinov as Detective Hercule Poirot and also starring Maggie Smith, Jane Birkin, James Mason, Roddy McDowall, and Diana Rigg. In addition, on November 8 from 9:00 am to 1:00 pm, the museum will host “Teacher Workshop: Activism and the Art of Machine Dazzle,” comprising a curator-led tour, an art workshop, and refreshments.
Members of the FLN hide from French paratroops in Gillo Pontecorvo’s neo-Realist classic The Battle of Algiers
THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966)
Aaron Davis Hall
160 Convent Ave.
Thursday, October 27, free with RSVP, 6:00
Series continues monthly through May 11 citycollegecenterforthearts.org
Curated by the great Dr. Jerry Carlson, longtime host of the television show City Cinematheque, City College’s free “Decolonizing Movies: Un-Tarzan Series” believes that “movies were never innocent in the colonial enterprise. Yet brave filmmakers continue to push back and create alternative decolonizing visions.” The series opened September 29 with Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girls and returns October 27 with a screening of Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers.
In Pontecorvo’s gripping neo-Realist war thriller, a reporter asks French paratroop commander Lt. Col. Mathieu (Jean Martin), who has been sent to the Casbah to derail the Algerian insurgency, about an article Jean-Paul Sartre had just written for a Paris paper. “Why are the Sartres always born on the other side?” Mathieu says. “Then you like Sartre?” the reporter responds. “No, but I like him even less as a foe,” Mathieu coolly answers. In 1961, French existentialist Sartre wrote in the preface to Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, the seminal tome on colonialism and decolonialism, “In Algeria and Angola, Europeans are massacred at sight. It is the moment of the boomerang; it is the third phase of violence; it comes back on us, it strikes us, and we do not realize any more than we did the other times that it’s we that have launched it,” referring to European colonization. “There are those among [the oppressed creatures] who assert themselves by throwing themselves barehanded against the guns; these are their heroes. Others make men of themselves by murdering Europeans, and these are shot down; brigands or martyrs, their agony exalts the terrified masses. Yes, terrified; at this fresh stage, colonial aggression turns inward in a current of terror among the natives. By this I do not only mean the fear that they experience when faced with our inexhaustible means of repression but also that which their own fury produces in them. They are cornered between our guns pointed at them and those terrifying compulsions, those desires for murder which spring from the depth of their spirits and which they do not always recognize; for at first it is not their violence, it is ours, which turns back on itself and rends them; and the first action of these oppressed creatures is to bury deep down that hidden anger which their and our moralities condemn and which is however only the last refuge of their humanity. Read Fanon: you will learn how, in the period of their helplessness, their mad impulse to murder is the expression of the natives’ collective unconscious.” Sartre’s brutally honest depiction of colonialism serves as a perfect introduction to Pontecorvo’s film, made five years later and then, unsurprisingly, banned in France. (In 1953, the Martinique-born Fanon, who fought for France in WWII, moved to Algeria, where he became a member of the National Liberation Front; French authorities expelled him from the country in 1957, but he kept working for the FLN and Algeria up to his death in 1961. For more on The Wretched of the Earth, see the documentary Concerning Violence: Nine Scenes from the Anti-Imperialistic Self-Defense.)
Terrorism and counterinsurgency take to the streets in Oscar-nominated THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS
In The Battle of Algiers, Pontecorvo (Kapò, Burn!) and screenwriter Franco Solinas follow a small group of FLN rebels, focusing on the young, unpredictable Ali la Pointe (Brahim Haggiag) and the more calm and experienced commander, El-hadi Jafar (Saadi Yacef, playing a character based on himself; the story was also inspired by his book Souvenirs de la Bataille d’Alger). Told in flashback, the film takes viewers from 1954 to 1957 as Mathieu hunts down the FLN leaders while the revolutionaries stage strikes, bomb public places, and assassinate French police. Shot in a black-and-white cinema-vérité style on location by Marcello Gatti — Pontecorvo primarily was a documentarian — The Battle of Algiers is a tense, powerful work that plays out like a thrilling procedural, touching on themes that are still relevant fifty years later, including torture, cultural racism, media manipulation, terrorism, and counterterrorism. It seems so much like a documentary — the only professional actor in the cast is Martin — that it’s hardly shocking that the film has been used as a primer for the IRA, the Black Panthers, the Pentagon, and military and paramilitary organizations on both sides of the colonialism issue, although Pontecorvo is clearly on the side of the Algerian rebels. However, it does come as a surprise that the original conception was a melodrama starring Paul Newman as a Western journalist.
All these years later, The Battle of Algiers, which earned three Oscar nominations (for Best Foreign Language Film in 1967 and Best Director and Best Original Screenplay in 1969) and underwent a 4K restoration for its fiftieth anniversary, still has a torn-from-the-headlines urgency that makes it as potent as ever. “Decolonizing Movies: Un-Tarzan Series” continues November 12 with Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s The Last Supper, December 7 with Robert M. Young’s The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez, and January 26 with Lino Brocka’s Manila in the Claws of Light.
Who: Al Pacino What: Benefit screening and Q&A for the Actors Studio Where:United Palace Theatre, 4140 Broadway at 175th St. When: Thursday, October 27, $35-$1000, 7:00 Why: The Actors Studio is celebrating its seventy-fifth anniversary with a special event at United Palace Theatre on October 27 at 7:00, a screening of Sidney Lumet’s classic Brooklyn-set drama Dog Day Afternoon, followed by a conversation with the star of the film and current Actors Studio copresident, Al Pacino. “This incredible institution, founded by Elia Kazan, Cheryl Crawford, and Robert Lewis, followed by Lee Strasberg, has left an indelible mark on the world of film and theater,” the East Harlem-born Pacino said in a statement. “It’s where actors are given the freedom to take chances and explore their work and craft. Anyone can audition for the Actors Studio. I’m surprised more people don’t know that. Once an actor becomes a member of the Actors Studio, it doesn’t cost anything, it’s totally free, and membership is for life. It’s going to be a great night at the United Palace. I look forward to watching Dog Day Afternoon and engaging, live, with an audience of New Yorkers, some who will be seeing it for the first time and others who will be seeing it for the first time in years.”
The 1975 film, based on a true story, earned six Oscar nominations, including Pacino for Best Actor, and won one statuette, for Frank Pierson’s original screenplay. Pacino stars as Sonny Wortzik, who leads a bank robbery with his friends Sal (John Cazale) and Stevie (Gary Springer) for a very special reason; the cast also features Chris Sarandon, Carol Kane, Lance Henriksen, Judith Malina, Dominic Chianese, James Broderick, Penelope Allen, and Charles Durning. Tickets for the event range from $35 to $1000; the other copresidents of the Actors Studio, the home of Method acting, are Alec Baldwin and Ellen Burstyn. “There are actors all over the world [who] regardless of their circumstances, professional or personal, regardless of whatever difficulties they are facing, whatever problems or changes — there is one thing they can rely on and that is that eleven o’clock on Tuesday and Friday mornings come rain, shine, snow, or what have you there is a session in the Actors Studio. And the fact that actors can count on that, that they know that that exists, can help them get through,” longtime studio artistic director Strasberg, who played Hyman Roth in The Godfather II opposite Pacino’s Michael Corleone, explained once upon a time.
Dustin (Jeremiah Garcia), Mike (Jeffrey Laughrun), and Lucas (Jamir Brown) prepare for battle in Stranger Sings! The Parody Musical (photo by Evan Zimmerman_MurphyMade)
STRANGER SINGS! THE PARODY MUSICAL
Playhouse 46 at St. Luke’s
308 West Forty-Sixth St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Thursday – Tuesday through August 13, $39-$111 www.strangersingsthemusical.com playhouse46.org
Fans of Stranger Things — and I am proudly one of them — can’t get enough of the Netflix series, an engrossing horror story that premiered in 2015 and will present its fifth and final season in 2024. In addition to books, comics, video games, and podcasts, there is also Stranger Things: The Experience, an immersive presentation that has traveled to New York, San Francisco, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and London, and Stranger Sings! The Parody Musical, which has returned to Manhattan, continuing at Playhouse 46 at St. Luke’s through August 13.
Stranger Things takes place in the mid-1980s in the small, close-knit all-American town of Hawkins, Indiana. “We wanna welcome you to Hawkins / Where everything is a total cliché! / We’re just like folks from classic films and TV shows / It’s nostalgic and you love us that way! / We live a safe, simple life here in Hawkins / Our government says there’s nothing to fear! / Expect nothing but the everyday normal / Cuz stranger things have never happened here,” the cast announces at the beginning.
Nerdy twelve-year-olds Lucas Sinclair (Jamir Brown), Dustin Henderson (Jeremiah Garcia), and Mike Wheeler (Jeffrey Laughrun) stop their Dungeons & Dragons game to help find the missing Will Byers, a shy young boy who has disappeared. Will’s mother, Joyce (usually played by Caroline Huerta but I saw the vibrant Hannah Clarke Levine; the actor portraying Joyce also operates Will, a small puppet), is distraught and determined to locate her son, with or without the support of the local sheriff, Jim Hopper (Shawn W. Smith), who has his own scars when it comes to family. Also involved are Will’s older brother, Jonathan (Garrett Poladian), an oddball aspiring photographer; the oh-so-cool and handsome Steve Harrington (Poladian), who has the hots for Nancy Wheeler (Harley Seger), Mike’s adorable older sister; and Barb Holland (SLee), Nancy’s best friend and perpetual third wheel.
Joyce Byers (Caroline Huerta) is determined to find her son in playful parody (photo by Evan Zimmerman_MurphyMade)
Strange things start occurring following the mysterious appearance of Eleven (Seger), a young girl with scary powers. “She looks like an escaped mental patient,” Dustin says. He’s not that far off; Eleven, whose real name is Jane, has run away from a government-run testing facility where she was under the care of Dr. Brenner (Poladian), known as Papa. “I always wanted a dad / Who never would make me cry / One who’d tell me, ‘Kid, I’m so proud of you,’ / Instead of ‘Stay in your cell til July,’” she sings. Throughout the show, Dr. Brenner and two men in white lab coats keep trying to track down Eleven and bring her back to the facility, supposedly for her own safety.
Oh, there’s also a murderous demogorgon hanging around, an evil creature in tight spandex that has emerged from the Upside Down, a creepy hell where Will and Barb have been taken.
You don’t have to be a big fan of Stranger Things to get a kick out of the parody musical, but it does help, as it is filled with inside jokes and aural and visual references to the show as well as the 1980s themselves. Audience members, a few of whom arrive dressed like some of the characters, sit on all four sides of the central staging area, which is surrounded by tree branches, as if the Upside Down is ever-present (the set is by Walt Spangler), and dozens of props (courtesy Brendan McCann) that are used in the show, from a 1980s telephone and bicycle handlebars to gynormous walkie-talkies and a boombox. There are also four beanbag chairs for audience members who want occasional interaction with the performers.
Barb Holland (SLee) stands up for herself and lets everyone know it in Stranger Sings! (photo by Evan Zimmerman_MurphyMade)
Jonathan Hogue wrote the book, music, and lyrics, which are lots of fun, with arrangements and orchestrations by Michael Kaish and playfully goofy choreography by Ashley Marinelli. The production, which features such musical numbers as “Hopper Triggered,” “Getting Closer,” and “Where There’s a Will,” is too long at 110 minutes with intermission, but director Nick Flatto keeps it all from descending into chaos; the creepy lighting and sound are by Jamie Roderick and Germán Martínez, respectively, and Matthew Solomon’s costumes immediately identify who is who. (You can come in your own costume October 21-31 and qualify for audience-voted prizes each night.)
The engaging cast captures the essence of the series, the feeling of constant impending doom along with the promise that comes with adolescence as the residents of Hawkins explore who they are and who they might be. Levine is terrific as Joyce, although a scene about Winona Ryder, who plays the mother on the show, although funny, jars you out of the narrative. Smith is fab as the brave, heroic sheriff, and Poladian is a hoot switching between the heartthrob Harrington and the weird Jonathan. Eleven is relegated to a relatively small role in the parody and, curiously, Dr. Brenner, played by a composed and careful Matthew Modine on Netflix, is portrayed here as a bumbling idiot.
Stranger Sings! does seek to right a terrible wrong from the streaming series in resurrecting Barb, who is mostly forgotten after a pool party; she doesn’t even make the cut in the nineteen-character cast list on Wikipedia. But the parody gives her several star turns, complete with well-deserved grudges. When Jonathan asks, “I’m confused . . . who is that?” Barb replies, “That’s right. Who IS that? Could that be poor Barb Holland, the throw-away plot device who not one person thought to look for??” SLee brings down the house a few times, but there ends up being too much of Barb; I wanted more Eleven. And for fans of Max, as I am, the show primarily stays within the first season, with some Easter eggs of what is to come.
In his seminal 1972 book Ways of Seeing, British essayist, novelist, and cultural thinker John Berger writes, “According to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but have by no means been overcome, the social presence of a woman is different in kind from that of a man. A man’s presence is dependent upon the promise of power which he embodies. . . . The promised power may be moral, physical, temperamental, economic, social, sexual — but its object is always exterior to the man. A man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you. . . . By contrast, a woman’s presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her. Her presence is manifest in her gestures, voice, opinions, expressions, clothes, chosen surroundings, taste — indeed there is nothing she can do which does not contribute to her presence. Presence for a woman is so intrinsic to her person that men tend to think of it as an almost physical emanation, a kind of heat or smell or aura.”
American filmmaker Nina Menkes forever changes the way you’ll see and experience movies in her eye-opening documentary Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power. “As a filmmaker and as a woman, I found myself drowning in a powerful vortex of visual language from which it is very difficult to escape,” she explains at the beginning of the film, an adaptation of her illustrated lecture “Sex and Power: The Visual Language of Oppression.” Producer and director Menkes, whose filmography includes Queen of Diamonds,Magdalena Viraga, and Dissolution, speaks with sixteen women and two men and shows clips from more than one hundred and twenty-five films as she reveals how much the movie industry is reliant on the male gaze, creating fantasy spaces that celebrate men while objectifying women.
Dartmouth filmmaker and faculty member Iyabo Kwayana posits, “I think we have to consider that it is through the formal visual language that we are effectively communicating meaning, and we inherit so much subliminally that comes from this language and it has to do with how shots are composed and framed, how they’re assembled and ordered in a sequence of shots. All of that becomes the grammar and syntax by which meaning is conveyed to a viewer. So in a visual culture such as ours, in which there is a ravenous appetite towards the female as object, if the camera is predatory, then the culture is predatory as well.”
Menkes divides her talk into five sections that comprise what she calls “The List”: “Subject/Object,” “Framing,” “Camera Movement,” “Lighting,” and “Narrative Position.” Among the films she examines are The Lady from Shanghai,Super Fly,Contempt,Carrie,Lost in Translation,Cuties,Crazy Rich Asians,Sleeping Beauty,Do the Right Thing,Blade Runner 2049, and The Silence of the Lambs, revealing how ingrained it is to depict men and women differently, what Transparent producer, writer, and director Joey Soloway calls “propaganda for patriarchy.” Director and activist Maria Giese adds, “Hollywood has been the worst violator of Title VII [part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act] of any industry in the United States — even worse than coal mining.”
Actress Rosanna Arquette shares the abuse she suffered at the hands of Harvey Weinstein as well as the regrets she has about a nude scene she did in After Hours. Menkes includes nude scenes throughout the film, involving Brigitte Bardot, Jane Fonda, Nicole Kidman, and many other familiar stars, describing how they can be “attacks on our selfhood.” She demonstrates how the use of slow motion focuses on a woman’s erotic sensuality but a man’s power and violence. Menkes also explores how the depiction of women on celluloid impacts sexual abuse.
Global Media Center for Social Impact founder Sandra de Castro Buffington asks, “How is rape culture normalized? There are really three key elements that we see on the screen and in real life. One is the objectification of women’s bodies. Another is the glamorization of sexual assault, especially on the screen. And the third is disregard for women’s rights and safety, even if a hand is not laid on another person. These are all of the elements that create an environment that allows one group to gain and maintain power over another.”
California State University faculty member Rhiannon Aarons expounds, “I think this visual language really contributes to female self-hatred and insecurity in a way that is not insignificant. What is normalized as beauty is really seen specifically and dominantly through a male gaze. I think that really changes how we relate in the world in general and not necessarily in the best way.”
Menkes spends extra time delving into such films as Raging Bull,Bombshell, and Mandingo, demonstrating how women’s voices are silenced and power dynamics are ingrained in visual storytelling. She uses a critical scene from Portrait of a Lady on Fire to display how director Céline Sciamma exposes that subject-object power dynamic and turns it around. Among the other women providing important insight are psychoanalyst Dr. Sachiko Take-Reece, writer Jodi Lampert, UCLA Film and Television Archive director May Hong HaDuong, intimacy coordinator Ita O’Brien, producer-director Amy Ziering, cinematographer Nancy Schreiber, author Maya Montanez Smukler, film theorist Laura Mulvey, filmmakers Julie Dash, Eliza Hittman, Catherine Hardwicke, and Penelope Spheeris, and foley artist and activist Lara Dale, who said no to sexual exploitation, effectively ending her career as an actress. Two snippets from a “Sex and Power Talk Discussion” at the California Institute of the Arts feel extraneous, but every other minute of Brainwashed is riveting.
The film is insightfully edited by Cecily Rhett and smartly shot by Shana Hagan, with a compelling score by Sharon Farber; Menkes purposely hired women to head the major departments, something she points out that Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow did not do on The Hurt Locker.
Reflecting on her 2007 feature Phantom Love, Menkes says, “All of my own narrative fiction films have been centrally concerned with expressing the abject feminine — and the wound that is carried deep inside.” We still have a long way to go to heal that wound, but Brainwashed sets us on a path to affect the way we see and interpret cinema. As actor and comedian Charlyne Li tells us, “There’s a saying that people say that if people were to get rid of all the sexual predators that there would be no film industry.”
Brainwashed opens October 20 at DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema, with Q&As with Menkes at the 7:00 screenings on October 20 (moderated by critic and podcaster Violet Lucca) and October 21 and with Geise and director and programmer Dara Messinger on October 22.
Park Chan-wook’s Thirst is part of “Vampire Weekends” midnight series at IFC
THIRST (Park Chan-wook, 2009)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Friday, October 14, and Saturday, October 15, midnight
212-924-7771 www.ifccenter.com
Winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes, Park Chan-wook’s Thirst is a different kind of vampire movie. Inspired by Émile Zola’s novel Thérèse Raquin, the creepy Korean flick stars Song Kang-ho (The Host,Memories of Murder) as Sang-hyun, a friendly priest who volunteers to participate in a dangerous experimental program that is attempting to develop a vaccine for a deadly virus. Unfortunately, he succumbs to the disease, his body covered in nasty boils, but he surprisingly arises, reborn, with a deep desire to suck some blood. However, he still is the same friendly priest with a moral soul, so he is unwilling to kill to fill his belly. As he gains superhuman strength, he grows closer to Tae-ju (Kim Ok-vin), the virtually imprisoned adopted sister / wife of a goofy childhood friend (Shin Ha-kyun) who is cared for by his doting mother (Kim Hae-sook). But as Sang-hyun and Tae-ju get hot and heavy — one particular sex scene is among the hottest in a good movie since Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Betty Blue in 1986 — their thirst threatens to overwhelm them and everyone around them. Eschewing standard vampire lore — don’t look for garlic, crucifixes, bats, wooden stakes, or a Van Helsing-like character — Park (Joint Security Area, the Vengeance trilogy) examines the complex spirituality and sexuality of a man of the cross, a figure always dressed in black (reminiscent of Count Dracula) who is forced to challenge his faith and humanity. At 133 minutes, Thirst is a half hour too long, with several scenes that could have served as an ending, but hang in there; no one can tell a story like Park Chan-wook, even if he is an acquired taste — like, say, blood.
Thirst is screening at midnight on October 14 and 15 in the IFC Center series “Vampire Weekends,” consisting of half a dozen horror favorites being shown in conjunction with the release of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire on AMC/AMC+. The series continues through November 5 with Tony Scott’s The Hunger, Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk til Dawn, and Michael Rymer’s Queen of the Damned. Park’s latest film, Decision to Leave, which earned him Best Director honors at Cannes, was a selection of the sixtieth New York Film Festival and opens at Lincoln Center on October 19.
A trio of nurses deal with a deadly epidemic in early Guy Maddin cult classic, Tales form the Gimli Hospital
TALES FROM THE GIMLI HOSPITAL (REDUX) (Guy Maddin, 1988/2022)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, October 14
212-924-7771 www.ifccenter.com zeitgeistfilms.com
In a 2011 twi-ny talk focusing on a “reframed” version of his 1988 debut feature, Tales from the Gimli Hospital, Canadian director Guy Maddin said, “I thought, of all the films of mine that might actually thematically justify a revisiting from the director (something that truly ought not to be done under almost any circumstances!), then this was the title.” Well, Maddin has done it again with a 4K restoration of the film, which he is now calling Tales from the Gimli Hospital (Redux), featuring some trimming as well as the addition of a long-lost scene.
The Canadian DIY master reached into Icelandic sagas for the original, ultra-low-budget version. In many ways a kind of Scandinavian Frankenstein as if directed by Ingmar Bergman and George A. Romero, the mostly black-and-white Expressionist film is a story within a story (at times within another story) that an old woman, Amma (Margaret Anne MacLeod), is telling her grandchildren (Heather and David Neale) in a hospital room where their mother lies very ill. The dark, lurid fairy tale, set in “a Gimli we no longer know,” is about Einar the Lonely (assistant director Kyle McCulloch), a shy fish smoker who does not know how to relate to other people, particularly women. Felled by an epidemic, he is brought to the Gimli Hospital in Manitoba, where other men battle this dread disease, which leaves stitchlike scars on their face and body. Einar is discouraged that the patient in the bed next to him, the portly Gunnar (Michael Gottli), is treated much nicer by the nurses than he is, but he is helpless to do anything about it. Gunnar is soon telling Einar the story of his true love, Snjófridur (Angela Heck), a tragic tale with a surprising twist that brings everything full circle.
A unique visual stylist who regularly pays homage to the early days of cinema, Maddin, who directed and edited the picture (and wrote the script on Post-it Notes), purposely keeps things low-tech, including less-than-perfect sound dubbing and bumpy cuts, incorporating freak-show-like oddities alongside an ominous lo-fi soundtrack with old songs; Maddin (My Winnipeg,Careful) himself plays the weirdo surgeon who operates on Gunnar and Einar in rather strange fashion. The intentionally amateurish nature of the original work led to its being rejected by the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) for ineptitude; it went on to become an instant cult classic, holding the midnight-movie slot at the Quad for nearly a year. In 2011, Maddin, who is part Icelandic, reimagined the film in the special Performa presentation Tales from the Gimli Hospital: Reframed, a reedited version with a live score by Icelandic musicians. Tales from the Gimli Hospital (Redux), a 4K restoration that premiered at TIFF 2022, goes a few steps further.
“The new scene was shot in 1999 as an after-the-fact deleted scene as a way of celebrating a cast reunion after a serious car accident injured the actor Michael Gottli,” Maddin explains. “The act of shooting this scene was intended as a kind of rehab therapy for my dispirited thespian. But it turned out quite well, I think. It is inserted early on in the feature, during the scene in the hospital when a primitive Punch and Judy puppet show is deployed as an anesthetic distraction to a patient (Gottli) having his leg operated on by a man wielding a sickle. Such puppet shows were the only anesthetic available in the pioneer days of Gimli. The new scene suggests to the patient a hallucinated tale of gender transformation and some lusty BDSM involving yet another man with a fish net. I had promised Gottli I would insert this ‘deleted scene’ into the body of the feature if I ever got the chance.”
This stunning new iteration opens theatrically October 14 at IFC, preceded by Maddin’s dazzling six-minute award-winning TIFF short The Heart of the World, about science battling religion and two brothers in love with the same woman as the end of the planet approaches, with the director on hand for Q&As following the 8:10 shows on Friday and Saturday night. Maddin is both fascinating and fun to listen to, so snag your tickets now for what promises to be a special event.
