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How to watch Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould
1993 · François Girard · Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch each title card cut the film into a separate piece. (structure)
Thirty two internal titles announce each fragment and refuse to let one flow into the next, denying you the illusion of a single continuous story.
Payoff: The gaps between fragments are doing as much work as anything inside them. In the reading: interstice / the "AND". Deleuze calls a cut that bridges nothing, a true gap, the interstice or the AND.
Notice how often rooms look too large for the man in them. (light)
Winter light, glass, and reflection keep interposing surfaces between Gould and the world, and the studio, diner, and hotel room all carry the same emptied, isolating quality.
Payoff: The empty spaces read as a resource for him, not as a hardship. In the reading: espace quelconque (emptiness). Deleuze calls a space stripped down to bare potential an any-space-whatever, and Gould's rooms are exactly that.
Listen for the diner scene's overheard conversations turning musical. (sound)
Fragments of surrounding talk are arranged into a texture of overlapping voices, echoing the layered radio documentaries Gould himself built out of ordinary speech.
Payoff: The scene teaches you to listen the way its subject listened.
Watch Feore do almost nothing and stay watchable anyway. (performance)
Feore plays a man of enormous internal activity and minimal external display, carrying posture and habit without ever tipping into caricature or spectacle.
Payoff: Watching a face receive music is different from watching hands perform it.
Notice the low chair and pill bottles that keep recurring. (staging)
The film handles Gould's father built chair, his coat and gloves, and his medication as attributes rather than props, the iconography by which he is recognized.
Payoff: Recurring objects stand in for the biography of explanation the film refuses to give you.
Once you have seen it
Notice whose hands you are actually hearing during Feore's scenes. (sound)
Feore never plays the piano in this film, the music on the soundtrack is Gould's own old recordings, so a living actor's body and a dead man's playing occupy the same scene.
Payoff: The film never tells you which one of them you are actually watching. In the reading: hyalosign. Deleuze calls a point where the real and the recorded become impossible to separate a crystal image.
Notice how the film's ending returns to where it began. (structure)
The last fragment loops back to the aria the way the Goldberg Variations return to their opening theme, closing a circle instead of building to a climax.
Payoff: The circular structure argues that a life does not end in a conclusion, only a return.
Notice how the interview testimony sometimes contradicts the dramatized scenes. (structure)
People who knew Gould describe him in ways that do not always agree with each other or with what you have just watched an actor perform.
Payoff: The film lets the disagreement stand instead of choosing which account is true.
Carry this in: Watch the gaps between fragments as closely as the fragments themselves.
A Deleuzian reading of Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould →