Review of Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (1993) by Joseph S — 22 Nov 2008

Precursor to "I'm Not There" and inspiration for one of my favorite Simpsons episodes, "Twenty Two Short Films About Springfield", and in turn influenced by Bach's 32 part "Goldberg Variations".

Some shorts are a interviews with friends and family, others are dramatizations like Gould On Gould, a mock interview, written by the real Glenn Gould. On friend commits their enconter to a breif animtated vignette involving circles and sheperes. The dramatizations come mostly in the form of monogloues(often by telephone) or Gould's silent interactions with people like hotel maids.

Glenn Gould, as I discovered through this film, was a Canadian pianist of well renown, as much for his technical expertise, as for his eccentric personality and musical philosophy. A child prodigy, he was best known for his performances and recordings of Bauch, until the mid 60's when he decided to never perform again, and to only record, giving alternate reasons at alternate times, from "performances make music into a sporting event", to "the positioning of seats is a kind of class warfare", to "performances distract from the music", among many others.

Gould also focused on radio plays which sought to bend voices into a kind of musical flow, where dozens of conversations and recordings would be played almost simulatenously letting phrases and senteces weave in and out of each other like musical notes.

The film focuses on the eccentricities, and it's outsiders view of Gould, who was both a hermit and known for constant, lengthy, and impromptu phone conversations with a number of friends and even strangers. The movie gives us a variety of perspectives, both personal, imagined, recorded, and dramatized, into a near perfect bio-pic format. Colm Feore gives a great performance as well, he's really the glue that holds this film narrative together. Though it's a series of vignettes, there is a narrative at work, details revealed over time, at the right moments.

Anyway it interested me enough to make me took a look at his music, and manages to avoid the "tortured genius" format so many films, and films about musicians can fall into. It's a contradiction of a film as much about how a full depiction of a human life is impossible, as it is about the compulsion to communicate, however abstractly, as is depicted in one scene where Gould invites a hotel maid to listen to a recording of his, he watches her benignly, and once she realizes the music is his she feigns a smile, it's a brief desperate slightly comic moment, but it speaks volumes.

Here's an advertisement he put in personals read aloud calmly by Feore in a bathrobe from a room surrounded by books, "Wanted: friendly, companionably reclusive, socially unacceptable, alcoholically abstemious, tirelessly talkative, zealously unzealous, spiritually intense, minimally turquoise, maximally ecstatic moon, seeks moth or moths with similar qualities for purposes of telephonic seduction, Tristanesque trip-taking, and permanent flame-fluttering, no photos required, financial status immaterial, all ages and non-competitive vocations considered, applicants should furnish sets of sample conversation with notarized certification of marital disinclination, references re: low decibel vocal consistency, itinerary and sample receipts from previous successfully completed out-of-town moth flights, all submissions treated confidentially...".

That about says it.