Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould

Snapshot

A biographical film that refuses the biopic, Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould takes its structure from Bach's Goldberg Variations — the aria and thirty variations that Gould recorded twice, in 1955 and 1981, bookending his career — and builds a portrait from thirty-two discrete fragments rather than a continuous life. Some are dramatised scenes with Colm Feore as Gould; some are talking-head interviews with people who knew him; some are animation, X-ray imagery, or abstract passages of light and sound with no human figure at all. The film covers roughly the same territory a conventional biography would — the Toronto childhood, the withdrawal from live performance in 1964, the studio years, the hypochondria, the telephone friendships, the death at fifty in 1982 — but it declines to arrange that territory into a causal narrative, and it declines to explain him.

The gambit is that the form of the film should resemble the form of its subject's thinking. Gould was an editor as much as a performer, a man who believed the splice was an artistic instrument rather than a concealment, and who left behind not only recordings but radio documentaries built from overlapping voices. A film about him made of assembled fragments is therefore not a stylistic conceit imposed from outside but an argument about method. It was Girard's second feature, it emerged from a Canadian production culture with unusually strong arts-documentary instincts, and it has outlasted most early-1990s art films because the structural idea turned out to be portable: the "fragmentary portrait" film is now a recognisable mode, and this is one of its foundational examples.

Industry & production

The film was made in Canada in the early 1990s, in an environment where feature production depended heavily on public funding bodies and broadcaster participation — Telefilm Canada, provincial agencies, and the arts-documentary culture built around the CBC and the National Film Board. This is not incidental context. A film with no conventional plot, no star, and a structure borrowed from a keyboard work would have been extremely difficult to finance in a purely commercial market; the Canadian system, with its public-service mandate and its long tradition of documentary and experimental short production at the NFB, is the kind of environment in which such a project is plausible.

The Glenn Gould estate's cooperation was material to what the film could be. Gould's recordings are the film's soundtrack, and access to the Sony/CBS catalogue of his Bach, and to archival material and personal effects, shaped what could be dramatised. The film's use of the actual Gould performances rather than a re-recorded surrogate is one of its defining decisions, and it required the rights to be in place. The interviews with people from Gould's life — colleagues, friends, associates — likewise depended on the estate's and the subjects' willingness, and place the film in a documentary-adjacent posture that a purely dramatic production would not have had.

The scale was modest. This is a film of small rooms, a diner, a recording studio, a car interior, a hotel, and northern landscape — locations rather than sets, short scenes rather than sequences. The thirty-two-part structure is, among other things, an economical structure: each unit can be shot as a self-contained piece, and the film does not require the continuity infrastructure of a conventional narrative shoot. Girard came to it from a background in shorts, music video, and arts programming, and the film is in a real sense a compilation of shorts made by someone fluent in that scale.

Distribution followed the arthouse and festival path — a critical success that travelled internationally on reviews and word of mouth rather than on a marketing campaign. It has had a durable second life on home video and streaming, and its canonical status has been consolidated by repertory and boutique-label attention rather than by any single moment of commercial breakthrough. Precise budget and gross figures are not something I can state reliably here, and the film's reputation was never really a box-office story in any case.

Technology

Two technological histories run through this film, and they are not the usual ones.

The first is the technology of recording, which is the film's actual subject. Gould's 1964 withdrawal from the concert hall was a wager on magnetic tape: he argued that the recording, assembled from takes and splices, could achieve an interpretive precision live performance could not, and that the concert was a vestigial ritual sustained by an audience's appetite for the possibility of failure. The film takes this seriously as an idea rather than treating it as eccentricity. Scenes set in the studio show the apparatus — tape, monitors, the control room, the producer's relationship to the performer — as the actual site of Gould's art. The film's own editing then enacts the same claim: if the splice is legitimate for Gould, it is legitimate for a film about Gould.

The second is the technology of the telephone and the broadcast studio. Gould conducted much of his social life by long-distance call, and made radio documentaries — the Solitude Trilogy, beginning with The Idea of North — in which multiple voices were layered into what he called contrapuntal radio, speech treated as polyphony. The film draws on this directly: passages built from overlapping speech, voices arranged as musical lines rather than as dialogue, are a citation of Gould's own radio practice. A viewer who knows The Idea of North recognises the film's sound design as homage; a viewer who does not still registers it as a formal signature.

Photochemically, the film is a conventional 35mm production of its period, but it incorporates imagery that is not: X-ray plates, animated abstraction, optical and graphic passages. The mixed-media inclusion is technologically unremarkable in itself and expressively central — it establishes that the film reserves the right to represent Gould by non-photographic means when photography would be inadequate.

Technique

Cinematography

The photography is precise, controlled, and unusually attentive to the difference between registers. Because the film moves among modes — dramatised scene, interview, abstraction, archival-feeling material — the camera has to signal which mode is in play without commentary. Interviews are shot plainly, frontally, in the grammar of documentary talking heads. Dramatised passages are more composed: symmetrical framings, held shots, a stillness that matches the subject's own inwardness. Abstract passages abandon representational space entirely.

The most-cited image is the one that lends the film its emotional weather — Gould alone in northern landscape, or in the diner scene where his attention drifts from the room's conversation into a kind of orchestrated eavesdropping. The film's visual vocabulary is one of isolation given architectural form: figures placed in rooms slightly too large for them, glass and reflection used to interpose surfaces between the man and the world, winter light. The cold is not decorative; Gould's fascination with the Canadian North, and with solitude as a condition rather than an affliction, is the film's central thematic axis, and the photography carries it.

There is also a strain of visual wit. Sequences involving the pills, the medical charts, the layers of clothing in mild weather, are shot with a comic deadpan that keeps the film from reverence. The camera observes eccentricity without editorialising.

Editing

Editing is the film's governing art, at two levels. Within scenes, cutting is restrained — many vignettes are single sustained shots or very few setups, which lets performance and duration do the work. Between scenes, the cutting is everything: the film is a montage of thirty-two units whose adjacency generates meaning that no unit contains.

The ordering is not chronological, and the film gains its shape from juxtaposition — a piece of biography set against a piece of abstraction, an interview recollection set against a dramatised moment that complicates it. This is the Goldberg Variations logic: a theme is not developed toward a climax but examined from thirty-two angles, each self-contained, the whole cohering by accumulation and return rather than by progression. The film's ending returns to its beginning, closing the circle as the Goldbergs return to the aria.

The internal titles that name each film are themselves an editing device. They enforce the discreteness of the parts, denying the viewer the illusion of seamless flow and insisting on the constructedness of the portrait. The film never lets you forget you are watching an assembly.

Mise-en-scène / staging

Staging is spare and often frontal, with a strong sense of the frame as a bounded space the subject occupies alone. Recurrent settings — the studio, the diner, the hotel room, the car, the northern exterior — are treated almost as recurring keys rather than as locations advancing a plot. Objects carry weight: the low chair Gould's father built and which he used for his entire career, the pill bottles, the coat and gloves, the recording equipment. These are handled as attributes rather than props, the iconography by which the man is recognised.

The absence of certain things is as pointed as the presence of others. The film is notably uninterested in staging Gould's psychology through conventional dramatic confrontation — there are almost no scenes of interpersonal conflict, few of intimacy, and the relationships that shaped his adult life are largely handled by indirection or omission. Whether this is discretion, an estate-cooperative production's tact, or a formal principle — the film's refusal to explain — is a live critical question, and the film does not settle it.

Sound

Sound is where the film is most inventive. Gould's own recordings supply most of the score, and the film treats them not as accompaniment but as the object of attention: there are passages where the music is the event and the image is subordinate. Bach dominates, appropriately, but the selection ranges across the repertoire Gould made his own.

Beyond the music, the film builds sequences out of ambient speech treated musically — the diner scene, in which overheard fragments of surrounding conversation are arranged into a texture, is the clearest instance and the most direct citation of Gould's contrapuntal radio. Gould's own speaking voice, and his habit of humming while playing (audible on his commercial recordings and a longstanding point of contention with engineers), are part of the film's sound world. Silence is used with equal deliberateness; the film's abstract passages sometimes withhold sound entirely, and the effect is to make the returns to music feel like restorations.

Performance

Colm Feore's Gould is the film's central achievement and its most delicate calibration. The performance is not impersonation-as-spectacle. Feore plays a man of enormous internal activity and minimal external display, and the film asks him to be watchable while doing almost nothing — sitting in a diner, taking a phone call, lying in a hotel room, walking in snow. He carries the physical signature (the posture, the low seat, the hands, the swaddled dressing) without letting it become caricature, and the humour in the performance is dry rather than broad.

Crucially, Feore does not play the piano in the film in the sense of supplying the music: the sound is Gould's. The performance is therefore of a listener and a thinker as much as a player, and the film organises itself around a face registering music rather than around hands producing it.

The interview subjects perform a different function. Speaking in their own voices about a man the audience has just watched a fiction of, they introduce friction — testimony that does not always agree with the dramatisation, or with itself. The film's portrait is built partly out of that disagreement.

Narrative & dramatic mode

The film's mode is the essay-portrait: non-linear, modular, mixed in register, organised by formal principle rather than by causality. It is a biography in the sense that its material is a life, and an anti-biography in that it withholds the biopic's essential product — the explanation, the account of how the man became the man.

The thirty-two-part structure does specific work. It equalises the parts: a piece of childhood memory, a joke about pills, an abstract animation, and a meditation on the North all occupy the same formal slot and carry the same nominal weight, so the film has no hierarchy of significance. This flattening is an argument. A conventional biopic tells you which events mattered; this film declines to, on the grounds that a person is not a sequence of decisive events and that the parts of Gould that mattered most were not dramatic in any external sense.

The consequence is that the viewer does the assembly. The film supplies fragments and trusts accumulation; the portrait exists in the space between the pieces rather than in any of them. This is the same demand modernist collage makes, and it is the source of both the film's admirers' enthusiasm and its skeptics' complaint that the method substitutes an elegant idea for an encounter with a person.

Within individual segments, the dramatic mode varies from near-documentary observation to comedy to pure abstraction. The film is confident enough in its container to let the tone move a long way between units.

Genre & cycle

The film sits at the intersection of the composer/musician biopic, the arts documentary, and the structuralist essay film — and it belongs to none of them comfortably.

Against the musician biopic, it defines itself by negation: no rise-and-fall arc, no scene of the gift being discovered, no triumph, no reconciliation. Where the genre typically uses music as emotional punctuation for a dramatic life, this film uses a life as commentary on the music.

Against the arts documentary, it borrows the interview apparatus and the archival posture but breaks them with fiction, so that the authority of documentary testimony is placed in a frame that admits invention.

Its truest genre affiliation is the modular portrait film — works that construct a subject from numbered or discrete parts rather than from a continuous narrative. The 1990s were hospitable to this: the decade saw sustained interest in non-linear structure across art cinema and, differently, in mainstream cinema's chaptered and shuffled narratives. Thirty Two Short Films belongs to that broader moment while taking its specific structural licence from music rather than from literature or from crime-film chronology games.

It also belongs to a small tradition of films about performers who withdrew — the artist-as-recluse film — and, more locally, to a Canadian cycle of works about interiority and northern space.

Authorship & method

François Girard came to the film from shorts, music video, and arts television, and his subsequent career confirms what this film establishes: an interest in music as film's organising principle rather than its ornament. The Red Violin (1998), which followed, again structures itself around a musical object and again distributes its narrative across discrete episodes — there, centuries and cities rather than variations. Girard's method in Thirty Two Short Films is essentially curatorial: he devises a container, generates heterogeneous material to fill it, and lets the arrangement carry the argument. This is closer to how a record producer or a radio documentarian works than to how a dramatist works, which is fitting for a film about Gould.

Don McKellar co-wrote the film with Girard, and his contribution is legible in its tone. McKellar — actor, writer, and later director of Last Night (1998) — was a central figure in the Toronto film scene of the period, and his sensibility, dry and self-aware and allergic to sentiment, is a good part of why the film's eccentricity plays as comedy rather than as pathology. The collaboration continued: McKellar co-wrote The Red Violin with Girard as well. The writing's achievement here is largely one of selection and restraint — deciding what not to dramatise, and trusting fragments to imply what scenes would have flattened.

Colm Feore, discussed above, is effectively a co-author of the portrait, since so much of what the film asserts about Gould is asserted through a face and a body rather than through dialogue.

The cinematography and editing are the film's structural instruments, and the editing in particular is inseparable from the conception — the film was, in a real sense, designed at the cutting bench, since its meaning lives in adjacency. I should be candid that I don't want to attribute specific credits to specific names without certainty; the crew were drawn from the Canadian production community, and the work is of a high technical standard throughout.

The music is not a composed score but a curated one: Gould's own recordings, principally Bach, selected and placed. That decision is itself the film's boldest authorial move, because it means the film's most powerful expressive resource was made by its subject. A composed score would have interposed another artist between the film and Gould; using the recordings means the film's emotional peaks are Gould's own performances, and the film's job becomes framing rather than scoring.

Movement / national cinema

This is a distinctly Canadian film, and specifically an English-Canadian film made by a Québécois director — a crossing that is itself notable in a national cinema usually discussed as two separate cinemas.

Several Canadian traditions converge in it. The National Film Board's documentary and animation legacy underlies the film's comfort with non-fiction technique and with abstraction as legitimate expressive means. The CBC's arts-broadcasting culture — the culture that produced Gould's own radio work — is the film's immediate ancestor. And the Toronto film scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the milieu around Atom Egoyan, Bruce McDonald, and Don McKellar, supplied its personnel and much of its sensibility: formally alert, ironic, interested in mediation and in the ways technology stands between people.

Thematically, the film is Canadian in its preoccupation with the North as an idea rather than a place. Gould's The Idea of North is the explicit reference, and the film inherits its argument that solitude and northern space are constitutive of a certain Canadian imagination. The film participates in that discourse rather than merely depicting it.

It also belongs to the moment when Canadian art cinema achieved sustained international critical standing — the years when Egoyan, Denys Arcand, and others made Canadian film a fixture at major festivals. Thirty Two Short Films was part of that visibility.

Era / period

1993 sits at a specific juncture. The independent and international art-film sector was in an expansionist phase, festivals had become efficient discovery machines, and audiences were unusually receptive to formal experiment. The same period saw non-linear structure move toward the centre of film culture. This film's fragmentation is not fashion-following — it derives from Bach and from Gould — but it arrived when audiences were newly equipped to read discontinuity as design rather than as failure.

It also arrives at a specific moment in the culture of recorded music. The compact disc had recently completed its displacement of vinyl, Gould's catalogue was being reissued and reassessed, and the questions he had raised in the 1960s about the recording versus the concert had become the ordinary condition of musical life. The film's central argument — that the studio is a legitimate artistic site and the splice an instrument — reads in 1993 as vindicated rather than provocative.

Finally, 1993 is eleven years after Gould's death in 1982, close enough that the people who knew him could speak on camera, far enough that a life could be treated as a completed shape. The film exists in that window.

Themes

Solitude as a chosen condition. The film's most persistent argument is that Gould's withdrawal was not pathology but a considered position — that isolation was the precondition of his work rather than its cost. It presents the evidence without insisting on the verdict.

Mediation. Nearly every relationship in the film is conducted through a technology: the telephone, the microphone, the recording. Gould's preference for mediated contact over presence is the film's structural as well as thematic subject, and the film's own mediated portrait — fragments, interviews, reconstructions — makes the same point about itself.

The North. Not landscape but idea: emptiness as a moral and imaginative resource, drawn straight from Gould's radio work.

Performance and its refusal. What is a performer who will not perform? The film treats Gould's 1964 exit as the defining act and lets it stand as a genuine philosophical position about audiences, risk, and the concert ritual.

The unknowability of a life. The thirty-two-part form is finally an epistemological claim: no account is complete, testimony conflicts, and a person exceeds any arrangement of facts about them. The film's refusal to explain is its most consistent ethic.

Ecstasy and the body. Against the intellectualism, the film keeps returning to physical states — the humming, the hunched posture, the pills, the hands in hot water, music as bodily rapture. Gould is not presented as a disembodied mind.

Reception, canon & influence

Critical reception was strongly favourable. Reviewers praised the structural conceit as genuinely earned rather than gimmicky, singled out Feore's performance, and treated the film as an unusually intelligent answer to the biopic problem. The recurring reservation was the mirror image of the praise: that the fragmentary method, however elegant, keeps the subject at arm's length, and that a viewer might finish the film knowing a great deal about Gould's surfaces and little about his interior life. The film has weathered that criticism well, partly because the distance is plainly deliberate. In Canada it was received as a significant national film and was recognised in the domestic awards of its year; I'd rather not itemise specific prizes without checking them.

Influences on the film (backward). The primary influence is Gould himself — the Goldberg Variations as structural template, the contrapuntal radio documentaries as sound-design model, his writings on recording as the film's intellectual position. Beyond that, the essay-film tradition, in which argument and association displace narrative, is the obvious antecedent; so is the modernist collage portrait more broadly, and the NFB's tradition of mixing animation and abstraction with documentary. The impulse to build a portrait from contradictory testimony has an obvious ancestor in Citizen Kane, though this film drops Welles's investigative frame and the promise of a solution along with it. Contemporaneously, the Toronto scene's interest in mediation — most visibly Egoyan's films about video and surveillance — is a shared preoccupation rather than a direct influence.

Legacy (forward). The film became the standard reference point for the fragmentary or numbered biographical portrait, and its title alone is now shorthand for the form. Todd Haynes's I'm Not There (2007), which distributes Bob Dylan across six performers and multiple registers, works the same territory — the musician who cannot be captured by a single continuous account — and the lineage is direct enough that the two are routinely discussed together. The broader turn in music biography away from cradle-to-grave narrative and toward formal invention has this film as one of its early landmarks.

Within Girard's own career the influence is explicit: The Red Violin extends the modular, music-structured method to a global historical canvas and reached a far larger audience, giving the approach commercial proof. For Feore, the film established a reputation for precise, intelligent character work.

The film has also had a durable second life outside cinema, as one of the principal vehicles by which Gould's reputation reached people who do not follow classical music — a genuine cultural function, and one that returns to the film's own subject. Gould left the concert hall believing recordings would carry his work to listeners he would never meet. A film assembled from splices, doing exactly that, is the argument proved.