A Film Canon

A documentary about legendary pianist Glenn Gould's life and philosophy is faced with a bind - how to reconcile his eccentricity with his quest for anonymity; or, rather, how to present anonymity as eccentricity, and detail his relentless drive towards self-effacement without effacing the rationale or impetus for the documentary itself, or making it feel disrespectful of his own disregard for funerals, eulogies and memorials. To some extent, Girard solves this problem with a highly idiosyncratic structure, in which - as the title suggests - Gould is distributed across thirty-two short films, which range from reconstructions and interviews to more whimsical, arcane and eccentric pieces. Taken alone, however, this structure would merely suggest multiplicity, rather than the inscrutability that Girard seems to be aiming for - and what makes it a more startling paean to Gould's paradoxes is the time and attention Girard devotes to his radio career, largely dismissed or reduced to marginalia before this point. If Gould's eccentric anonymity was encapsulated in his early decision to stop performing to live audiences altogether, reserving his talent for professional recordings, then Girard understands Gould's radio career as the logical conclusion of this process, insofar as it completely elides the piano as an unnecessary third term in Gould's more loving, fascinated relationship with the recording apparatus itself. Yet even that apparatus is ultimately presented as incidental to Gould's insatiable fascination with his own voice, as several of the short films - most notably 'Gould Meets Gould' and 'Truck Stop' - condense his unusual solipsism to the desire to simply listen, endlessly, to recordings of his own voice, rather than record them. In the most sophisticated way, it's a kind of aesthetic vision of autism, or even psychosis - Gould is continually where he's not - and ultimately begs the question of whether Colm Feore is even required to play Gould at all, or whether he wouldn't be better represented through piano recordings, voice recordings and, above all, the Gould-abstractions that preoccupy so many of the films. These include an X-ray of a piano-playing body ('Diary Of One Day'), a visual catalogue of pharmaceutical drugs ('Pills') and, most memorably, an animated accompaniment to one of Gould's Goldberg Variations, upon which the entire structure of the film is based ('Gould Meets McLaren'). In this way, Girard abstracts music and speech until graphology becomes a kind of musical notation, page lines replace stave lines, and Gould is taken to a cold, sublime place deep in his own voice. This is figured alternatively as the North Pole, which bookends the film - Gould's radio program was called 'The Idea Of North' - and the deepest reaches of outer space, with the inclusion of one of his pieces on board the Voyager. In the end, the most radical conclusion of the film is that Gould wasn't primarily a musician, and its most striking aesthetic gesture the absence of any actual footage of him playing the piano - which isn't to say that the piano isn't critical, but that it's subordinated to his more overarching skills as a mathematician, logician and mnemosyne, as evinced in possibly the most memorable film, 'CD018', which uses an aria as the pretext for a technological tour of the inside of a piano. At the very least, it gestures towards some radically new, aleatory music, a concrete manipulation and deconstruction of Gould's piano-object, a vision or version of the masterpieces he never composed, conducted or directed.