Margin Rockers: Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (1993, dir. François Girard, Canada)

by Matt Olsen

Further digressing from the professed theme, this week’s film centers on a person so far into the margins of rock music that he’s a classical pianist. However, it earns inclusion due to its merit as an extremely successful example of a thankfully untraditional musical biography. Because a person’s history can’t be contained in their high highs and low lows, an accurate life story has to include countless digressions into the ordinary, off-topic, and non-narratively dependent. Happily, all of these are included among the eponymous thirty-two short films.

As the title suggests, the film is divided into chapters, mostly chronological, but only some of which directly intend to dramatize moments from the Canadian prodigy’s life. Furthermore, only some of those are relevant to his career in music and, even further furthermore, only some of those would likely be considered pivotal experiences. 

As much as the segments are not bound by any one variety of content, they also ramble through approaches to execution and style. There are documentary interviews, live performances, visual metaphors, and even animation. 

Chapter Five “Gould Meets Gould: text by Glenn Gould” stages an imagined interview between Gould and himself – as was actually written by Gould in his lifetime. Chapter Ten: “CD318” presents a Gould performance as it might have been seen from inside the piano with close-ups of felted hammers falling on taut bronze strings. Chapter Twenty-Three: “Pills” is a slideshow of still images over a narrated list of Gould’s many prescriptions. 

At least half of the film does feature biographical scenes with the terrific actor, Colm Feore, portraying Gould from his early twenties to his death at age 50. Though he’s undeniably eccentric – Gould took to wearing gloves and a scarf regardless of the weather – the film takes care to show him beyond the troubled genius cliché. Feore grounds Gould as an active, interested human with a sense of humor and balanced desires for separation and friendship. 

In the end, the viewer is left with less of a dates-and-names type history and more of an emotional understanding of Gould’s experience. The effect is like knowing a person from the contents of their junk drawer: old photos, receipts, notes, and flyers. “A brush with greatness.” In an interview, Gould suggested a mathematical ideal of time spent alone versus with others. As a person who valued privacy and solitude, it’s entirely appropriate and respectful for the film to leave much of the story to Gould’s keeping.

Matt Olsen is a largely unemployed part-time writer and even more part-time commercial actor living once again in Seattle after escaping from Los Angeles like Kurt Russell in that movie about the guy who escapes from Los Angeles.