Thirty-two Short Films About Glenn Gould. - movie reviews

Commonweal, June 17, 1994 by Richard Alleva

His two versions of Bach's Goldberg Variations bracketed the recording career of Glenn Gould. The first, released in 1956 with thirty-two contact-sheet photos of a glistening, music-possessed young man on its cover, gained him international celebrity. The second performance, a quarter of a century later, dreamier and even more innovative than the first, was the last Gould record released in his lifetime. And this album's photograph shows a fifty-year-old man so haggard and troubled that he seems to be envisioning the stroke that will kill him in a few months.

For the liner notes of the first version, Gould wrote a remarkable analysis in which he called the variations "music which observes neither end nor beginning, music with neither real climax nor real resolution, music which, like Baudelaire's lovers, |rests lightly on the wings of the unchecked wind.'" Whether or not that's an accurate account of the music, it is certainly a just description of the structure of Thirty-two Short Films about Glenn Gould, Francois Girard's brilliant evocation of Gould's singularity. Though there is a certain rough linearization here (childhood scenes early, premonitions of death near the fade-out, etc.), this is not a straightforward narrative straining toward a climax. There is no psychologizing. There isn't even a particularly intimate view of the protagonist. After an opening in which Gould walks toward the camera through a barren wintry landscape while the aria from Goldberg is heard on the soundtrack, we watch thirty self-contained movies about thirty aspects of the pianist's life. Each one is a variation on the theme of aloneness as practised by the Canadian musician. Not loneliness, mind you. Aloneness. Its joys and costs. Ninety minutes later, we watch another shot of Gould in the same winterscape and this time he's moving away from the camera. Aria, variation, aria.

It's hard for me to think of any recent movie to equal this one's economy and purposefulness. Each of the thirty-two scenes moves with absolute assurance of rhythm and design to make its point. But it's also hard to think of any other recent movie with "points" so ineffable, so complex, so resistant to literary paraphrase.

Consider an early sequence dealing with Gould's childhood. In a vacation cottage facing a lake, the boy, scarcely more than a toddler, begins playing under his mother's tutelage. Close to the camera, he sits in her lap and she gently guides his fingers over the keys. We feel the emotional inextricability of maternal warmth and artistic stirrings. And, in the far right comer of the shot, the head and torso of the father working on the lawn or in the garden is visible through an open window. At first, we may feel some Freudian or Jungean paradigm is being mounted here. Doesn't the nurturing but perhaps smothering mother represent creativity and beauty to her son while the masculine parent, laboring at his sweaty, "manly" task, stands for the harsh unheeding world? But no, this simpleminded opposition just won't do. The first scene is immediately qualified, almost contradicted, by the two following. The little boy is discovered at the lakeside pier, feet dangling over the water, blissfully doing incredibly complicated multiplication problems out loud while the adult Gould wonders on the soundtrack what his intellectual fate would have been if his mother hadn't guided him to music. The strangeness and potency of this child's mind outstrip parental promptings. Next, we see both parents as amazed voyeurs of their son's singularity. They stand together outside a parlor and peek inside at the boy listening in rapture to a radio broadcast of Toscanini conducting orchestral excerpts from Tristan und Isolde. Tears course down his cheeks. The final effect of this entire childhood sequence is to render Gould opaque but fascinating. It presents intellectual and artistic power as a mystery unexplainable by any theory. (In point of fact, both parents encouraged their son's musicality. Mr. Gould even built a sawed-off chair that accommodated Glenn's eyes-level-with-the-key posture.)

There are sequences that parallel or echo or reverse other ones. For instance, the image of amazed parents I described above is echoed by scenes in which we see people coming into contact with Gould through work or chance and being touched in some manner by his strangeness and the beauty that strangeness helped create. In a hotel room, a shy chambermaid is coaxed by the pianist to listen to a recording of Beethoven he's just made. She's somewhat frightened at first, then moved. A stagehand on the verge of retirement asks for the artist's autograph just before a concert and is amiably quizzed by Gould about how he'll spend his increased leisure time. Then, looking at the autograph, the stagehand is startled to find that beneath the signature Gould has announced his own retirement from concertizing. A stockbroker is amazed to learn, on a bearish Wall Street afternoon, that Gould is the only one of his clients to have made a killing. Putting down the phone after delivering the good news, he shakes his head in bemusement and mutters, "Piano player, ha...piano player."