How should a biopic go about expressing a person’s life: from cradle to grave, or a hop skip and a jump through chronology for what feels most relevant to the subject? 2023 offered us Maestro and Oppenheimer – two films that portrayed the lives of two titanic figures of 20th Century America in very different ways. Cooper sticks to the march of time until Bernstein’s death in 1990 without so much as a flashback, while Nolan engages in a typically non-linear examination of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s life in tandem with one of his greatest enemies. For all their structural variations, both films are built around performances and the unspoken belief that the closer the actor comes to necromancy, the more authentic the film will be for the audience.
François Girard’s 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould does something quite remarkable by eschewing the performance of the subject as the source of truth in the drama. Yes, it does have the superb Colm Feore playing Gould from a young man to his untimely death at 50, but Girard and screenwriter Don McKellar decided to split the pianist’s life into the titular number of segments, and present them in a roughly linear order. These segments are distinctive as they generally don’t dramatise important moments in Gould’s life because, as McKellar noted, he thought the celebrated musician had an “undramatic life.” Instead, they capture moments that are essential to understanding Gould – a man who lived by his own code yet forgot to give the world its cipher. Aside from being known for his eccentricities, Gould also retired from concert performances at the height of his success; wore a coat, hat and mittens in the hot Florida sun; and eventually communicated with the outside world almost entirely by phone or letter.
Girard’s film is an attempt to reconstruct that cipher through imagined moments and sequences leaning on evidence from Gould’s life, whether that’s interviews with people who knew him or texts and recordings by Gould himself. This includes a dramatization of “Gould Meets Gould” – an incredibly revealing mock-interview of Gould conducted by himself about his decision to abdicate concert performances in favour of studio recordings. Girard and McKellar’s approach reveals a self-reflective, witty personality who thought deeply about both his role as a musician, and his relationship with his audience. As violinist Yehudi Menuhin suggests, it’s something Gould thought a little too deeply about, and Girard stresses that his was a mind that was constantly active – often to his detriment as the montage of his many medications underlines.
In this important way, Gould the enigma opens up to the audience, not as the tortured artist in the grand old tradition of the biopic, but as a man content in his aural solitude.
Yet 32 Short Films never sentimentalises his behaviour under the banner of prescriptive diagnosis for the mawkish pleasure of the audience. In a refreshingly unsentimental manner, Girard emphasises the pleasure Gould got from his interactions with the world – especially the sonic delights. The sequences “Truck Stop”(where he effortlessly switches between eavesdropping on four different conversations), and “CD318” (so named for his beloved Steinway piano), capture his joy for sound and its many locations. It seems paradoxical that Gould would declare that he had no great love for the piano, but 32 Short Films makes it plain that his interest wasn’t in music, but in finding the right sounds. In this important way, Gould the enigma opens up to the audience, not as the tortured artist in the grand old tradition of the biopic, but as a man content in his aural solitude.
The image quality of Criterion’s release is indescribably beautiful, with Alain Dostie’s colour palette, favouring cool and soft tones befitting the subject’s love of a Frozen North. This is crisply rendered in the Blu-Ray transfer without any hint of muddiness in the varying shades of grey or green that make up short films like “Hamburg”. For a film so invested in its sonic landscape, the reproductions of Gould’s recordings of Bach are also appropriately clear, allowing us to catch the complexities of contrapuntal composition.
With only five supplements, the disc’s extras are a little disappointing, but does include a thirty-minute conversation between Girard and another great name of Canadian cinema – Atom Egoyan. The discussion is at its best when Girard talks about his methodology, while Egoyan’s natural (and understandable), excitement sometimes overwhelms the need for the director to speak about his subject. There are also excerpts of two interviews – one with actor Colm Feore and the other with producer Niv Fichman. The set is completed by a pair of archival documentaries (Glenn Gould – On the Record and Glenn Gould – Off the Record), that function as a two-part portrait of an artist at work in New York, and at home in Canada. They’re a lovely bookend to this imagined biography, but I wanted more from Criterion’s treatment – a musicologist talking about Gould’s artistry or a video essay comparing this film to others about classical musicians would have gone a long way.
32 Short Films is a ferociously dense, complex interplay of sound and image that attempts to capture a man of great contradictions, and it can feel exhausting on a first watch. That said, the film has a richness of form that elevates it above many more traditional biopics, mainly because it understands that a person is far more than a series of gestures to be imitated by a star- they’re someone in their own right first.
THIRTY TWO SHORT FILMS ABOUT GLENN GOULD IS OUT NOW ON CRITERION COLLECTION (UK) BLU-RAY
