Screen
Alleva, Richard
GOULD'S VARIATIONS THIRTY-TWO TAKES is two versions of Bach's Goldberg Variations bracketed the recording career of Glenn Gould. The first, released in 1956 with thirty-two contact-sheet...
...The final effect of this entire childhood sequence is to render Gould opaque but fascinating...
...this is not a straightforward narrative straining toward a climax...
...After an opening in which Gould walks toward the camera through a barren wintry landscape while the aria from Goldberg is heard on the soundtrack, we watch thirty self-contained movies about thirty aspects of the pianist's life...
...Putting down the phone after delivering the good news, he shakes his head in bemusement and mutters, "Piano player, ha...piano player...
...Doesn't the nurturing but perhaps smothering mother represent creativity and beauty to her son while the masculine parent, laboring at his sweaty, "manly" task, stands for the harsh unheeding world...
...That's what is wrong with it...
...or the little Glenn Gould, inspired by World War II movies, picturing himself as the dauntless captain of cargo ships menaced by German subs...
...At first, we may feel some Freudian or Jungean paradigm is being mounted here...
...we go into his medicine cabinet for a montage-ballet of pills which sums up the pianist's increasing addiction...
...But it's also hard to think of any other recent movie with "points" so ineffable, so complex, so resistant to literary paraphrase...
...his star-struck joy at being visited in his studio by one of his idols, Barbra Streisand, while his conductor, Stokowski, fumes at the interruption...
...And this album's photograph shows a fifty-year-old man so haggard and troubled that he seems to be envisioning the stroke that will kill him in a few months...
...Not loneliness, mind you...
...The strangeness and potency of this child's mind outstrip parental promptings...
...It's hard for me to think of any recent movie to equal this one's economy and purposefulness...
...And that's what is right with this movie...
...and Gould's very body is the subject of a sequence composed of x-ray shots of the musician's deteriorating condition...
...Close to the camera, he sits in her lap and she gently guides his fingers over the keys...
...It presents intellectual and artistic power as a mystery unexplainable by any theory...
...Next, we see both parents as amazed voyeurs of their son's singularity...
...Gould even built a sawed-off chair that accommodated Glenn's eyes-level-withthe-key posture...
...We feel the emotional inextricability of maternal warmth and artistic stirrings...
...RICHARD ALLEVA 22...
...Well, Glenn Gould, I venture, would have loved this movie for its purity of design, its use of variation form, and—perhaps most of all—for its respect for human strangeness...
...Consider an early sequence dealing with Gould's childhood...
...Its joys and costs...
...They stand together outside a parlor and peek inside at the boy listening in rapture to a radio broadcast of Toscanini conducting orchestral excerpts from Tristan und Isolde...
...For the liner notes of the first version, Gould wrote a remarkable analysis in which he called the variations "music which observes neither end nor beginning, music with neither real climax nor real resolution, music which, like Baudelaire's lovers, 'rests lightly on the wings of the unchecked wind.'" Whether or not that's an accurate account of the music, it is certainly a just description of the structure of Thirty-two Short Films about Glenn Gould, Francois Girard's brilliant evocation of Gould's singularity...
...The little boy is discovered at the lakeside pier, feet dangling over the water, blissfully doing incredibly complicated multiplication problems out loud while the adult Gould wonders on the soundtrack what his intellectual fate would have been if his mother hadn't guided him to music...
...A stockbroker is amazed to learn, on a bearish Wall Street afternoon, that Gould is the only one of his clients to have made a killing...
...No flashbacks to childhood traumas or wrestling matches with lovers...
...Then, looking at the autograph, the stagehand is startled to find that beneath the signature Gould has announced his own retirement from concertizing...
...But no, this simpleminded opposition just won't do...
...It may seem intrusive to go literally under a man's skin, yet somehow the effect is less so than if the director had invented dreams and motivations...
...What will people who know nothing of Glenn Gould make of this movie...
...Instead, we tap into Gould's consciousness as he mentally organizes the conversations going on in a highway diner into a sort of verbal music...
...Ninety minutes later, we watch another shot of Gould in the same winterscape and this time he's moving away from the camera...
...I can't help regretting that these glimpses of the surprisingly normal, lovable side of Gould didn't get into this movie (some of them are in the good but conventional CBC documentary, Glenn Gould: A Portrait), but it must be kept in mind that Francois Girard deliberately chose just those elements of the pianist's life that would contribute to a portrait of a glorious and harrowing solitude...
...For them, the spectacle of his oddness will not be mitigated by those "human interest" facts that Gould fans like myself pick up from interviews and articles: Gould reading Mad magazine to a friend's little boy and doing all the crazy voices with gusto...
...The first scene is immediately qualified, almost contradicted, by the two following...
...Each one is a variation on the theme of aloneness as practised by the Canadian musician...
...Though there is a certain rough linearization here (childhood scenes early, premonitions of death near the fade20 SCREEN out, etc...
...Tears course down his cheeks...
...The second performance, a quarter of a century later, dreamier and even more innovative than the first, was the last Gould record released in his lifetime...
...Certain other sequences draw us closer to Gould but not in the usual manner of fiction films...
...There are sequences that parallel or echo or reverse other ones...
...A stagehand on the verge of retirement asks for the artist's autograph just before a concert and is amiably quizzed by Gould about how he'll spend his increased leisure time...
...She's somewhat frightened at first, then moved...
...In a hotel room, a shy chambermaid is coaxed by the pianist to listen to a recording of Beethoven he's just made...
...And, in the far right corner of the shot, the head and torso of the father working on the lawn or in the garden is visible through an open window...
...There isn't even a particularly intimate view of the protagonist...
...Aloneness...
...Aria, variation, aria...
...In a vacation cottage facing a lake, the boy, scarcely more than a toddler, begins playing under his mother's tutelage...
...The Canadian actor, Colm Feore, does not do a virtuoso makeup artist's impersonation but captures the rhythms of his sub21 ject: the legato of the almost creamy baritone voice and the strange, slightly hunched gait which always reminded me, perhaps not so oddly, of the bearing of Richard Nixon, another self-isolated creature...
...For instance, the image of amazed parents I described above is echoed by scenes in which we see people coming into contact with Gould through work or chance and being touched in some manner by his strangeness and the beauty that strangeness helped create...
...Each of the thirty-two scenes moves with absolute assurance of rhythm and design to make its point...
...At the end of my review of Richard Attenborough's wretched icon of a screen biography, Chaplin (February 12,1993), I wrote, "Charles Chaplin would have loved this movie...
...The first, released in 1956 with thirty-two contact-sheet photos of a glistening, music-possessed young man on its cover, gained him international celebrity...
...In point of fact, both parents encouraged their son's musicality...
...There is no psychologizing...
Vol. 121 • June 1994 • No. 12
