Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould

The film gives the life of Glenn Gould in thirty two separate sections. Some are dramatised: Gould sitting in a diner, talking on the telephone, recording in a studio. Some are documentary: people who knew him speaking. Some are neither: abstract images, radio recordings, X-ray films. François Girard directs. Colm Feore plays Gould. The screenplay is by Girard and Don McKellar. The structure comes from Bach's Goldberg Variations. The work consists of an aria and thirty variations, and Gould's two recordings of it stand at the beginning and the end of his career. The film carries that number into its own form. The decision is not to build a whole portrait. His giving up concerts, his retreat into the studio, the medication, the obsession with the telephone and his distance from people sit side by side and none of it is explained. The best known section is the diner scene, where Gould listens to the conversations around him and the voices slowly become a piece of music. It won a number of Genie awards in Canada, including best film. Gould's own recordings are used throughout, and the music is part of the structure rather than of the narrative. Who it is for: listeners of classical music and viewers who like formally experimental biography. Who it is not for: the sectioned structure keeps interrupting, the life is not told straight, and it is not possible to get close to the man.