Contaminated Histories: Canadian Postcolonialism in Guy Maddin's Tales from the Gimli Hospital

Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin has built an international reputation upon eccentric, autobiographically tinged melodramas constructed from the visual motifs of silent-era cinema. During his career, he has also periodically mythologized his hometown of Winnipeg, whether depicting it as the capital of sorrow in The Saddest Music in the World [2003], or as the site of his own fraught family history in the poetic auto-ethnography of My Winnipeg [2007]. Reviewing a harvest of recent critical scholarship on Maddin, George Melnyk argues that No other Canadian filmmaker today is more postmodern and postcolonial than Maddin. In creating a retro cinema like no other he has actually caught the essence of contemporary Canadian identity as it struggles to articulate a self suited to a world where the old national-realist paradigm no longer holds. (1) In this sense, Melnyk echoes various critics who have previously remarked upon the apparent Canadianness of Maddin's films, (2) but I will focus instead on how he imaginatively refigures his Icelandic-Canadian ancestry in his first filmic vision of the Winnipeg area, Tales from the Gimli Hospital [1988]. This low-budget dark comedy, independently produced over two years, established Maddin as a distinct new voice in Canadian cinema, and garnered a cult reputation abroad (particularly after an eighteen-month New York run as a midnight movie). It has become something of a truism to describe Maddin as a postmodern director, but to position him as a postcolonial director is a task that deserves further elaboration. Because it not only displays the coalescence of a filmmaking aesthetic that would define Maddin's oeuvre, but also deliberately engages with the historical intersection of the diverse cultural strands that have influenced modern-day Manitoba, Gimli Hospital is arguably the most significant film through which to explore the postcolonial in his work. In humorously depicting the plight of Second World settlers--a postcolonial position between colonizer and colonized--through an anachronistically primitive aesthetic, his debut feature complicates not only the historical sublimation of immigrant ethnicity into national identity, but also blurs potentially colonialist distinctions between classical cinema and its own ancestors. By contaminating the supposed authenticity of and national myths, he finds a position to speak from the margins of a modern nation under the continuing threat of American cultural imperialism. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In contrast to Canada's naturalized settlers of predominately British origin, the Canadian prairies of the mid-to-late nineteenth century were populated by a high percentage of immigrants from other European nations, and the latter soon became marked as ethnic within the national imaginary, according to Gerald Friesen. (3) Indeed, according to one anonymous account, Winnipeggers did not initially recognize the group of Icelanders who arrived in 1875, expecting them to look short, about four feet, rather stout and thick set, with long black hair and much like the Eskimos. (4) The March 1875 eruption of Mount Askja had forced a large migration of about two thousand Icelanders to Canada, where they moved west and, claiming blocks of land reserved by the federal government for minority communities, established the fishing settlement of Gimli on the shores of Lake Winnipeg. (5) Gimli became the self-governing Republic of New Iceland in 1876, until its 1887 incorporation into the adjacent province of Manitoba. As W. Kristjanson notes, the creation of a separate colony for Icelandic settlers was prompted by a strong desire to preserve their cultural heritage. Even after becoming de facto Englishmen through the colony's place on Canadian federal territory, Lord Dufferin, Governor-General of Canada, promised the Icelanders the right to maintain their customs. (6) Yet, Friesen notes that, as the area became less ethnically homogeneous with the influx of non-Icelandic immigrants, a tension existed within the Icelandic community between public conformity to English-Canadian cultural norms and private, family-centered efforts to retain their language and culture and to instill in their children an awareness of and pride in their national heritage. …

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