Glenn Gould
Although my interest in classical piano is very close to nil, I’ve been meaning to see 32 Short Films about Glenn Gould for years &, through the miracle of Netflix, I finally did. The film, directed by François Girard in 1993 – the one film he’s completed since then was The Red Violin in ’99 – is a biopic of sorts, told not as a traditional narrative, but rather through a series of vignettes, each with its own title – “The L.A. Concert” – some of which are remarkably abstract for what is, behind the facets of this disjunct presentation, a reasonably linear tale. One is nothing other than a close shot of the strings and hammer’s of Gould’s piano – its serial number CD 318 – as he performs what will be his (unannounced) farewell concert at the age of 32. Another is an excerpt from Norman McLaren’s animation Spheres, Gould’s piano as both score & logic as the floating balls of the title subdivide, rotate, recombine – just the sort of thing that never could have been incorporated into a “straight” presentation, Hollywood style.
The film is of interest to me on two levels. One is Girard’s strategies as a film maker – I don’t have to be told that his approach is not dissimilar from the one I took in Under Albany – and the other is the question of Gould the person. At one level, there is nothing particularly Gouldesque about breaking the tale of a lonely (and relatively short-lived) savant into thirty-odd three-minute segments. If he had stopped performing at 29, would we have a shorter film? The film itself does nothing to point up the parallel between its sections & Gould’s biography.
Rather, I think the structure – which absolutely works as cinema – forced itself on the film. Not only does it enable Girard to bring in disparate elements as self-contained segments (one is nothing other than the image of a Gould soundtrack on film itself, others are interviews with Gould’s colleagues, such as Yehudi Menuhin), but it also solves the narrative problem of a film about a man who had few friends, no major relationships, and an isolative career. Gould may have been an unparalleled musician, but one doubts that he was a lot of fun to have around.
Gould is often presented as an example of how an individual with Asperger’s Syndrome, a variation of autism, can achieve great success – Einstein is another. To the film’s credit, it never addresses the issue of a diagnosis nor tries to collapse Gould’s obsessions into an extraneous explanation. It’s actually less interested in pathologizing him than The Aviator is with Howard Hughes. At the same time, 32 Short Films presents Gould as a textbook example of how a gift can be as much a curse as a blessing.
Gould’s retreat from performance is a case in point. Gould (played by Colm Feore to an almost spooky likeness) describes how much he hates the random acoustics of different venues, the barely acceptable pianos, the idea that different members of the audience will come to the event with less than adequate music backgrounds. His ideal relationship to music is a performance in which there is no audience & in which the control freak in him can pin down every aspect of what is heard. More than anything, Gould is shown not performing, but listening – playing a 78 of his just arrived record for a bewildered German chambermaid, running through a playback of a recording, conducting an invisible orchestra of the imagination, whether in his loft in
Indeed, the finest single scene in the film – it’s worth renting the movie for this alone – is called “Truck Stop,” in which Gould – apparently a regular at the diner in question (the waitress asks if he wants “the usual”) – does nothing but listen to other conversations all around him, as they evolve from a simple tale of a trucker picking up a female hitchhiker into a symphony of human voices & tones. It is exactly the same impulse you find in Apollinaire’s great poem, “Lundi rue Christine,” composed entirely of overheard conversation. The scene lasts only two or three minutes & isn’t done nearly as well as it should be, but you know just what the implications of this are. It’s one of only two or three scenes in the entire film – and the only one representing Gould’s adult years – in which the music on the soundtrack isn’t his, but rather Petula Clark’s jarringly upbeat Downtown. The very next scene shows Gould listening to – and “air conducting” – The Idea of North, one of his aural sound compositions for Canadian radio. Out the window, all we see is a view of ice to the horizon.
Music and Asperger’s, the film seems to argue, are not two separate things. Gould’s oeuvre as a performer may have been all the same old classics, attacked with a knowing verve that gives his sound its signature, but Gould himself was trapped in a purgatory closer to John Cage’s world – he was doomed to listen, to hear, in a world full of sound. His desire to live in the dark above the arctic circle makes utter sense in that context – he was trying to get beyond all that humming, buzzing stimulus.
The commitment any person makes to an art form necessarily entails sacrifice – it’s always a question of how much & to what end. Gould’s radio broadcasts are not Ezra Pound’s radio broadcasts, but ultimately each was an index of just how far beyond the point-of-no-return the artists had gone. Robert Grenier’s scrawl works often strike me in this same way – nobody else in my generation has ventured into writing quite that far, perhaps because there’s no guarantee you can get back again. And that may be why people who really get Grenier’s writing are so deeply devoted to it, whereas to the casual eye it can seem so obtuse.
