In this golden age of home viewing, the Criterion Collection still provides some of the best editions of the best movies ever released, usually with a rich selection of extras and often including audio commentaries (a feature they pioneered, and perhaps the greatest gift ever to film students and cinephiles alike). This column features one Criterion release per week, based entirely on where my interests lead me.
Glenn Gould (1932-1952) was not just another concert pianist. Among other things he was a child prodigy with a successful adult career who stopped giving public concerts in his early 30s (he continued to make recordings), attracted a cult fandom, was best-known for performing music from the Baroque period and earlier (before modern pianos existed), also performed serial music by composers like Schoenberg and Berg, took a lot of pills, and made radio documentaries with the CBC including The Idea of North.
Given that kind of life, you wouldn’t expect a film about Gould to follow the conventional form of a biopic, and thankfully director François Girard didn’t take that route. Instead, he gave us Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, whose title provides a reasonably accurate description of what this film is—except that there are only 31 short films, unless you count the credits as #32.* There’s something very Canadian (Girard is from Quebec) about that discrepancy, a gentle troll to separate the sheep from the goats, since it’s easy to miss but if you do spot it makes you feel unreasonably pleased with yourself.
The screenplay, by Girard and Don McKellar (whom I will forever remember as the hapless Darren Nichols from Slings and Arrows), presents vignettes from different periods of Gould’s life so that the resulting film resembles a puzzle that you need to assemble in your own mind. That seems like a fair reflection of Gould’s life and the result is far more intriguing than a more conventional treatment could possibly be.
Girard digs deep into the filmmaker’s toolkit for this film, using animation (courtesy of Norman McLaren), x-ray photography, and other distancing devices (most famously centering the optical track) while jumping around in time and place and placing a variety of characters before the camera without much explanation of who they are or why they’re important. Overall, it’s a gentle film, so that even tense moments like when Gould practically forces a maid to stay in his room turn out to be mostly benign: he just wanted her reaction to a particular recording and apparently didn’t consider that she might place another interpretation on his behavior.
At the center of it all is Colm Feore as the adult Gould, who manages to portray the humanity of a man whose behavior is often bizarre. Maybe that’s the price of genius, but Feore has you pulling for Gould even at his most self-centered. Some of the short films fill in a bit of the early years of a man who was apparently groomed from before birth to play the piano, a strategy that clearly worked in terms of his eminent career (he’s played at various stages of childhood by Devon Anderson, Joshua Greenblatt, and Sean Ryan). There’s not a hint of coercion, however—instead, Gould is portrayed as being consumed by music from an early age to the point that choosing any other path in life would have been ridiculous.
The soundtrack consists mostly of Gould’s own work, either his piano recordings or string music he wrote, and there’s also a lot of creativity in the use of diegetic sounds. For instance, in a diner scene, we observe him hearing multiple conversions by other diners at once and it becomes an illustration of both his isolation from ordinary people and his enduring interest in sounds of all kinds. | Sarah Boslaugh
*What happened to the usual hyphen in “Thirty-Two”? I have no idea, and the Canadian government does assure me it is expected in Canadian English as in the American version.
Spine #: 1268
Technical details: 93 min.; color; screen ratio 1.85:1; English.
Edition reviewed: Blu-ray (1 disc).
Extras: audio commentary with co-writer/director François Girard and co-writer Don McKellar; video interview with director Girard and filmmaker Atom Egoyan; excerpts of interviews with actor Colm Feore and producer Niv Fichman; two documentaries about Gould directed by Roman Kroitor and Wolf Koenig and produced by Canada’s National Film Board: Glenn Gould: Off the Record and Glenn Gould: On the Record; the film’s trailer. The Criterion website mentions an essay by Michael Koresky but the booklet was missing from my library copy.
Fun Fact: The title refers Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations, a recording of which launched Gould’s career, and was shot into space with Voyager 1 due to its inclusion on the Voyager Golden Record, an audio-visual disc meant to represent life on earth to extraterrestrial dwellers . The Bach piece consists of an aria, 30 variations, and instructions to play the aria again, which raises the question: does that comprise 31 or 32 parts?
Parting Thought: The 21st episode of the seventh season of The Simpsons is titled “22 Short Films Abut Springfield” and it’s a classic named on some “best of” lists. Is being parodied by The Simpsons still the best evidence of enduring cultural relevance or has something else taken its place?
