The title describes it exactly – Thirty Two Short Films about Glenn Gould is 32 short films about the celebrated pianist Glenn Gould, all directed by François Girard, who squeezes his compendium into just over 90 minutes. Which is pretty good going considering he’s covering quite a lot of territory and doing it in a multiplicity of styles.
The film came out in 1993, when the cult of Gould was still in full spate. It has since abated a touch, though the Canadian pianist is still the maverick genius to many – a humming cantankerous weirdo to others.
Girard takes his cue from the 32 individual pieces in the Goldberg Variations, one of Gould’s signatures, starting his series with Gould himself (the actor Colm Feore, in fact) advancing towards the camera across a snowy waste. From here a mix of the fictional and the factual – plenty of old interview and famous talking heads opining to camera. Early on, in film two, we get a little early history and discover that Gould decided to become a concert pianist when he was five – by ten he had book one of Bach’s The Well Tempered Clavier “pretty much under my belt”.
Later, Music documentarian Bruno Monsaingeon eulogises Gould. Yehudi Menuhin mildly criticises Gould’s decision to retire from live performance. His cousin worries about his hypochondriac use of pills (which Gould lists – it’s a long list). The fictional Gould gets a chamber maid to listen to a recording with him. The real Gould in archive footage bathes his arms in hot water before playing. We see the low chair, which made Gould look like Nosferatu at the pianoforte. The casual clothing in an era when concert pianists simply didn’t dress like that. There’s a clip of Gould in a truck stop enjoying everyday gossip. And in the recording studio where he’s painfully focused while the studio engineers try to keep things light.
It is the full enigmatic package. One moment a self-absorbed perfectionist, the next giving off a take-it-or-leave-it attitude as if he can rely entirely on talent to fill in whatever else are the shortcomings. “I’m not one of those piano freaks,” says Gould at one point, which is a bare-faced lie – he was freakishly obsessed about how his piano was set up.
Like the Beatles, Gould retired from live performance in the mid-1960s. This only threw fuel on the fire of the cult. Friends, family, members of his entourage and business acquaintances talk about him fondly but all are more or less in agreement with the verdict of one of them – “He was very much involved with himself.”
We are spared too much analysis of his private life or cheap psychologising. Was Gould gay, asks one journalist at one point, in film 18, which is a series of fictionalised encounters between Gould and various reporters. In film 19, an answer of sorts, a letter from Gould about being in love with a girl. It’s only scant seconds long, and then Girard is on to film 20 (a Norman McLaren animation of spheres in motion) and film 21, which goes into Gould’s hobby of playing the stock market.
Variety is key. If one short film doesn’t grab you by the vitals there’ll be an entirely different one along in a minute with an entirely different approach. Girard’s only real thread is chronological. We start out with Gould as a child and we end with his early death, aged 50 in 1982, after which the figure of Gould in the snowy wastes makes a re-appearance – presumably this is Glenn Gould in the great eternal which precedes and follows life on Earth.
Talking of which, Gould is heading out into space right now. A record of his playing of two extracts from The Well Tempered Clavier Book Two is on board the Voyager 1 and 2 spaceships, which blasted off from Cape Canaveral in 1977 and are now billions of kilometres away from Earth, heading thataway.
So even if human beings forget all about Glenn Gould, which seems unlikely – too talented, too idiosyncratic – the little green men will be able to continue feeding the cult’s flames.
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
