Via Criterion.com
In a CBS television concert broadcast in 1960, conductor and affable host Leonard Bernstein prefaced the appearance of pianist Glenn Gould, waiting in the wings to perform Bach’s Concerto No. 1 in D Minor, with a brief excursus on music notation. Bach, as Bernstein reminds viewers, gave little indication on the page of how his compositions should be played. To interpret Bach’s intentions, says Bernstein, “We must study the whole work, get to know its insides, and then draw our conclusions. So, Glenn Gould must decide, and I as his accompanist must decide with him, all kinds of matters of tempo and phrasing and everything else that we feel necessary to convey Bach’s deepest musical meanings to you, the listener.”
When Gould finally appears on-screen to offer his interpretation, with Bernstein’s orchestra in ferocious, staccato-style accompaniment, the twenty-seven-year-old wunderkind is a vision of tightly coiled showmanship: back hunched in intense concentration, shoulders bursting up on beat like popping corn, lips involuntarily moving along with the melody and rhythm while those majestically long fingers glide across the keys. There’s no doubt that Gould has found his Bach concerto, as Bernstein promised, “based on his own judgments, instincts, and highly individual personality.”
That highly individual personality is a large part of what made the reclusive Canadian one of the most improbably beloved and puzzled-over cultural figures of the twentieth century. Boasting an uncommon, titanic talent, Gould was also gifted with an endlessly burrowing intellect and a predisposition for antisocial behavior—a combination that resulted in an air of natural eccentricity that he cultivated as he aged. By the time of his sudden and shocking death at fifty, in 1982, the smoldering young pianist seen on Bernstein’s stage in 1960 had grown increasingly withdrawn—a celebrity still, but a hermetic one who had long given up public performance for the creatively rewarding safe zone of the recording studio. Even for his most devoted biographers, combing through Gould’s maddeningly copious notebooks, there would always be more questions than answers about his emotional life: speculation over the particulars of his sexual preferences, his all-consuming hypochondria, and his obsessive monasticism remains as central to a working knowledge of Gould as his exhilarating renditions of Bach, Beethoven, or Schoenberg. Public fascination with Gould’s cryptic personality resulted in an idolatry out of proportion to the modest, inward-turning body that produced it. A perplexing figure for whom music seemed the clearest key to unlocking his interior world, Gould, like Bach, left a lot of papers and notes but no blueprint for apprehending the rhythms, cadences, or essential truths of his being.
In approaching the life of this unusual public figure, fellow Canadian artist François Girard decided to take a novel, fragmentary approach. With Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (1993), the Quebecois stage and screen director fashioned an entirely fitting aesthetic and emotional design for a personage notoriously resistant to straightforward chronicling. Coming together as not so much a mosaic as a numerically precise pattern gradually revealing itself, the film is divided into segments of varying genres, forms, and address, from documentary to animation to abstracted shards of performed drama, all still following a roughly chronological trajectory—and carried along by the melodious physicality of actor Colm Feore. And why thirty-two? Of course, the number refers to the sections of the Goldberg Variations, which includes thirty, plus an aria and an aria da capo. But maybe it’s also because Gould was born in 1932 and grew up at 32 Southwood Drive in Toronto’s lakefront Beaches neighborhood. The significance of the number is never outwardly stated in the film. It could also be a matter of instinctive rhythm—music, after all, is a matter of time measurement. Central to the film’s rhythmic force, Feore is mischievous and mercurial, yet punctilious, a full-body inhabitation of the artist’s cerebral contradictions. Feore doesn’t just appear in Girard’s film—he’s so indivisible from its temperament that at times he seems to be orchestrating it himself.
One of the defining independent movies of its era, Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould—despite its seemingly rarefied air—was a breakout success, earning critical raves and international prizes, and even getting its cultural legacy confirmed by a beloved episode of The Simpsons titled “22 Short Films About Springfield.” The experimental nature of the film may have been embraced more easily by audiences in the early nineties, when a succession of notable art-house filmmakers—like Todd Haynes with Poison (1991), Krzysztof Kieślowski with his Three Colors trilogy (1993–94), and Quentin Tarantino with Pulp Fiction (1994)—were rejecting structural convention, and moviegoers were growing accustomed to this playing with form. Girard’s provocatively splintered excavation of Glenn Gould—or the idea of Glenn Gould—was an unlikely and significant exemplar of this trend.
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Girard created what his coscreenwriter Don McKellar has called an “anti-biopic.” Considering the stuffy legacy of cinematic classical-music biographies, from the florid romanticism of Cornel Wilde’s Chopin in A Song to Remember (1945) or Dirk Bogarde’s Liszt in Song Without End (1960) to the imperiousness of Gary Oldman’s Beethoven in Immortal Beloved (1994), Girard’s film is all the more refreshing for the playful way it toys with the cultural mythologization of its subject while avoiding the reductive tendencies of biopics. There is no central revelation, no moment of its subject’s existential self-awareness, no buried secret uncovered for us to bear witness to: Gould is all too human here, but Girard indicates that to make him too human, in any way “knowable,” would be a betrayal of his scrupulously maintained enigma.
The decision to break Gould’s life down into an even number of portions has mathematical as much as biographical meaning, functioning as an implicit tribute to the workings of Gould’s puzzle-obsessed brain. Gould’s piano style was frequently pointillistic; he performed music as if it were an equation parceled out into constituent parts. Listen to his gorgeous, maddeningly clean (and still, to some, controversial) rendition of Bach’s Prelude No. 1 in C Major from The Well-Tempered Clavier, a recording of which drifts over the final precredit sequence, called “Aria” in the credits (as is the opening overture). It’s a performance that forgoes flourish and flow so you can hear every . . . single . . . note, as though each is a feather being plucked from a chicken. Similarly, the conceptual gambit of the film evokes the breaking down of individual music components to create a harmonious whole.
Girard’s highly eclectic works have frequently centered around classical music, dance, or opera, from his breathtaking 1991 Le dortoir (The Dormitory), an often homoerotic dream ballet—sublimely adapted from the original choreography of Montreal’s Gilles Maheu and Danielle Tardif—set within the repressive confines of a deserted Catholic school; to his ravishing, epically scoped 1998 hit, The Red Violin; to his theatrical stagings of Stravinsky and Wagner. He once said, “Making a film is making music, no matter what.” He brings a rhythmic virtuosity to Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould; his facility with musical form, force, and rhythm is evident even in those episodes that aren’t scored to Gould’s recordings. This is fitting for a film about an artist who found the tone and cadence of people talking to be as richly fascinating as music itself. In his later career, Gould devoted himself to creating audio documentary projects such as The Idea of North, which investigated the mysterious expanses of the Canadian north that so captured his imagination by employing a series of overlapping narrators, the editing of which is depicted by Girard in the film’s sixteenth segment. Gould called such polyphonic experiments “contrapuntal radio,” employing contrasting voices to create a fugue largely without music.
It is there in the frozen north that Girard’s film begins, with Gould a tiny dot in a wide snowy landscape, a ghost in a black overcoat gradually moving toward the camera against a barely visible horizon line. This is the film’s overture, “Aria,” taking the name of the first of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, which quietly accompanies these images on the soundtrack. Though untitled, this segment is indeed one of the unnumbered thirty-two films, which also include, for those keeping count, the closing credits. (The eagle-eyed may note the number’s only appearance, in the twentieth film, “Gould Meets McLaren,” featuring the abstract animator Norman McLaren’s mesmerizing 1969 short Spheres, in which floating circles in geometric patterns split and reproduce like amoebas, set to Gould’s recording of Bach’s Fugue No. 14 from The Well-Tempered Clavier. The animation culminates in thirty-two spheres: four squares of eight circles held briefly on-screen before collapsing back into one solitary pod.)
Girard’s entire film is symphonic in construction. Even in terms of dramaturgy, it moves like music. There is a constant negotiation of emotion and order, pure feeling and strict analysis: as with music, the film glides—or stutters—from one movement to the next with seemingly free-form experimentation, yet there is a clear scheme for everything. However intentionally fractured, Girard’s film offers, as with any strong narrative, a series of crescendos and diminuendos across its fleet running time. Themes thread and recur, picked up like harmonies and motifs. The result is comprehensive, even panoramic. In the discursive, chimerical fifth segment, “Gould Meets Gould,” Glenn Gould embodies both interviewer and subject; both are bathed in the shadows of an otherwise vacant recording studio, debating ideas of fame, the performer’s “false sense of public responsibility,” and the hierarchies of power between musician and audience. This is directly followed by the more realist segment “Hamburg,” in which Gould, in full hypochondriac mode, cancels his upcoming concerts by phone while pacing a hotel room in the process of being disinfected by a harried chambermaid. Picking up on the previous segment’s inquiries into the structures of power that problematize true communication between performer and listener, Girard here dramatizes a moment of rare, unresolved communion: an enthusiastic Gould puts on a hot-off-the-presses record of himself playing Beethoven’s Sonata No. 13 and insists that the maid sit and listen. Initially resistant, she finally smiles and bops her head to the undeniable rhythm—a delight for Gould as much as for her.
Thematic variations and continuations play out, from the obvious to the barely perceptible. “The L.A. Concert,” denoting Gould’s final performance, leads directly to “CD318,” pure musical abstraction consisting of close-ups of the piano’s strings and hammers striking Bach’s Prelude No. 2 from The Well-Tempered Clavier in shots taken near the instrument’s soundboard. Without explanatory text or dialogue, the segment seems designed for the Gould aficionado: “CD318” is titled after the model number for Gould’s beloved Steinway, which he shipped back and forth between Toronto and New York and elsewhere in the early part of his career and continued to use in later recordings. At the end of this segment, handlers cover the piano and gently place Gould’s chair on top, like a baptismal rite. It’s the film’s only direct reference to one of the most mythic objects in Gould’s closet: his unusually low, custom-corrected chair, with its forward-sloped seat and legs that could be individually adjusted. By some accounts, it could place Gould as low as fourteen inches from the floor. A more conventional biopic would make a meal out of such idiosyncrasies; for Girard it’s just a passing reference for the schooled.
At the midway point, Girard returns us to the whiteout of the frozen Canadian north that started (and will end) the film. The seventeenth segment, “Solitude,” finds Gould ruminating on loneliness to an offscreen interviewer against the limpid modernist beauty of Sibelius’s Andantino from Sonatina No. 2. Asking him about his love of radio documentary, the unseen interviewer’s voice is heard shouting faintly, as if from a great distance, a choice that emphasizes the increased remoteness from which we will contemplate Gould through the rest of the film. This chapter marks a career turning point: going forward, musical performance, public or in the recording studio, will be a thing of the past. It’s also the beginning of his decline, and the narrative’s decrescendo. Girard now centralizes Gould as flesh-and-blood conundrum, presenting mostly linear episodes that detail an increasingly closed-off human lurching his way through his final years: his seeming lack of a sexual life (segments 19, “A Letter,” and 22, “Personal Ad”), his increasing reliance on an astonishing variety of incompatible medications (23, “Pills”), his growing and crippling hypochondria (25, “Diary of One Day,” with its scribbles of dates, times, prescriptions, and blood-pressure readings), and his halting thoughts on the supernatural and the afterlife (26, “Motel Wawa”). These last are related to an interviewer as Gould paces a lonely lakefront motel room, the fixed camera zooming toward a window, taking in the gray expanse of Lake Ontario beyond. Scared of death and sickness, and weakened by pills and poor diet as he may have been, Gould could never have known that his life would soon come to a premature end.
“Motel Wawa” is set to Piano Sonata No. 1 in A Major by Paul Hindemith, a German composer and theorist whose modern, free-form twelve-tone compositions were hugely inspirational to Gould from an early age, and through his final decade. (He even wrote an extensive liner essay for his own 1973 recording of Hindemith’s sonatas that earned Gould a Grammy, the only one he received during his life.) Such soundtrack choices, likely unknown to most viewers but subconsciously meaningful, speak to the thoughtful attention Girard pays to the musical inner life of his subject. For Gould, music was immaterial but consuming. According to his childhood friend Robert Fulford, “In Glenn’s mind, music was becoming refined and bodiless, almost entirely separated from the physical.” In his refusal to embody standard forms of psychological portraiture, willingness to wrestle with Gould’s stubborn corporeality, and ability to move his film on the subliminal waves of music, Girard pays tribute to the man and the musician in a way few conventional biographers could. Like Bach, Gould may have left us with only a trail of breadcrumbs for a full understanding of his intentions, but Girard has certainly given us notes toward a true reckoning.