Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man sits in a highway diner in a heavy coat, in weather that does not ask for one. He orders. Around him a waitress calls an order back to the kitchen, truckers talk, a couple in the next booth work through some grievance, and the sound of the room changes: the voices come apart into separate lines and begin to hold against one another. He is not listening to anyone in particular. He is hearing all of it at once, as counterpoint.

Hold onto that scene, because the film is assembled the way that man hears. Glenn Gould built radio documentaries out of layered speech and called it contrapuntal radio, voices arranged as musical parts rather than as dialogue. François Girard's answer to the problem of filming him was to stop narrating him and start scoring him: thirty-two short films, each announced by its own title, arranged after the Goldberg Variations — the aria and thirty variations Gould recorded at the start of his career and again near the end of it.

Thirty-two pieces, and no chronology. A childhood memory, then a deadpan bit about pill bottles, then an X-ray plate, then a passage of animated abstraction with no person in it at all. Nothing carries across the joins. In ordinary cinema a cut is a bridge: this room, then the next room, and the second shot picks up whatever the first set down. Gilles Deleuze had a name for the other kind of cut, the kind that bridges nothing. He called it the interstice, or, more usefully, the AND. The join stops being grammar and becomes a thing in its own right, a gap the viewer has to cross unassisted. This is why the title cards are not decoration. They hold the pieces apart. The portrait is not in any of the thirty-two units. It is in the thirty-one gaps between them.

You could call that fragmentation and stop. Deleuze's term earns its keep because it converts a description into a claim: the cut is doing the thinking. And once the image can no longer explain itself by what comes next, it has to be deciphered instead of simply watched. Deleuze's word for that is the lectosign, the readable image. The X-ray is the film's emblem for it. A photograph of a body that tells you nothing until somebody reads it.

Girard's specific invention was to take his method from his subject rather than impose one on him. Gould walked out of the concert hall in 1964 on an argument about magnetic tape: that a performance assembled from takes and splices could reach a precision the concert never could, and that the audience's appetite for live performance was really an appetite for the possibility of failure. The splice was an instrument, not a cover-up. Girard's move is to accept the argument and apply it to Gould himself. If the assembled take is the true performance, the assembled portrait is the true biography.

That is a version of what Deleuze called the powers of the false, and it is not about lying. It is about truth that gets made rather than found. Documentary's whole authority rests on a contract — the camera was there, this happened. Girard honours the contract and breaks it in the same gesture. Real people who knew Gould sit and speak in their own voices, in plain frontal documentary grammar, about a man the audience has just watched an actor invent. The testimony does not always agree with the dramatisation, or with itself, and the film never referees. Deleuze called this falsifying narration: incompatible accounts held as co-true instead of ranked. He built the idea largely out of Welles, and the debts here are exact. Citizen Kane supplies the architecture of testimony blocks that refuse to reconcile, minus the reporter and minus Rosebud, which is to say minus the promise that the fragments add up. F for Fake supplies the deeper permission: the splice as the argument itself, the editing bench as the place where authorship actually happens.

So the thirty-two descriptions never deliver their object. Deleuze called that a crystalline description — an image that composes its subject and then stands in for it, with no original left behind to check it against. The standing complaint about this film is that it keeps Gould at arm's length, that you finish it knowing the surfaces and not the man. That complaint is the method reporting itself as working. The film's ethic is that a person exceeds any arrangement of facts about them.

And there is a genuine crystal at the centre of it, in Deleuze's stricter sense: a point where the actual image and a virtual one become impossible to tell apart. Colm Feore does not play the piano in this film. The playing you hear is Gould's own recordings. Every performance scene therefore has a living body on screen and a dead man's hands on the soundtrack, and the film declines to say which one is Glenn Gould. The recording is what does this. It takes a present that is passing and preserves it as past, in the same instant, forever — which is Deleuze's description of how time works, turned into a consumer object. Gould understood this better than his engineers did. A film that ends where it began, as the Goldbergs return to the aria, is thinking in that shape.

Feore's task, then, is not to imitate a virtuoso. He has to be watchable doing nearly nothing: sitting in a diner, taking a long-distance call, lying in a hotel room, walking in snow. The film organises itself around a face receiving music rather than hands producing it. Deleuze's name for that figure is the seer, the one who watches and endures where an older cinema would have had someone act. The diner is his purest scene, a sonsign — a pure sound situation, where nothing can be done and everything can be heard.

Sound and image here are not partners. They are two self-standing works that touch across a gap, which is what Deleuze meant by heautonomy. There are passages where the music is the event and the picture goes quiet under it. There are abstract passages where the sound is withheld entirely, so that music coming back feels like a restoration. Meanwhile the film's spaces stop being settings and become weather: winter light, rooms slightly too big for the man in them, glass and reflection sliding between him and everyone else, the northern emptiness Gould had already claimed as an idea in The Idea of North. Deleuze called such places any-spaces-whatever — and this film's are the emptied, white kind, presented not as hardship but as a resource. Solitude as a working condition.

The apparatus itself is inherited, and honestly. Godard's Vivre sa vie gave Girard the numbered tableau and the intertitle, character accumulating by juxtaposition rather than by psychology. Sans soleil gave him the essay-film licence to let association rather than causation set the order. The NFB's Begone Dull Care gave him the right to drop pure graphic rhythm into a live-action portrait and call it a variation. And the NFB's own 1959 Gould documentaries gave him the iconography — the low chair his father built, the humming, the pills, the control room — which he restages as fiction, converting observed fact into played attribute.

What Girard did with all of it was make a film that thinks in the manner of its subject rather than about him: a noosign, an image of thought, where the structure is the argument and each of the thirty-two slots carries the same weight, so that a joke, a death, and an abstraction cannot be ranked. That flattening is the whole position. A biopic tells you which events mattered; this one holds that a life is not a sequence of decisive events and that the parts of this life that mattered most were never dramatic from outside.

It worked, and it travelled. I'm Not There scatters Dylan across six actors on the same principle, and the modular portrait is now a mode with a name, largely because of this film. What it did to the art is smaller to state and harder to do: it proved that a portrait can be a structure instead of a story, and that the most truthful thing you can say about a person may be the thing you decline to join up.

Watch it again for the joins. Every title card is a hand lifting off the keys.