Review of Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (1993) by Jonathan D — 07 Jun 2011

This is exactly what it says it is... but there's more structure than meets the eye. If you have absolutely no interest in the subject matter, there won't be much here for you, but I became interested in seeing this partly after getting a copy of Gould's two performances of "The Goldberg Variations" and partly because I liked the director's "The Red Violin".

The 32 short films run the gamut: tiny talking head interviews, dramatizations of events in Gould's life, fanciful dramatizations of letters he'd written, tours inside the soundboard of a piano, and abstract animations.

Yet the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. It is a cubist view of Gould - looking at him from many different perspectives to give you a sense of the man, his exceptional musical vision, and his eccentricities without cobbling together a forced narrative.