THIRTY TWO SHORT FILMS ABOUT GLENN GOULD
O Rare Glenn Gould!
"Do not be too quick to understand me," cautioned Andre Gide. Freud himself stated that psychoanalysis must needs lay down its arms before the riddle of the creative genius -- then proceeded to explicate Leonardo's unconscious motivation via a single dream and a few scraps of biography, with debatable results. Thereafter, many far less adroit analytic critics would inanely invoke potty problems or Oedipal angst to account for subtle art, neglecting the creator's constitutional make-up, the impact of cultural and historical influences, specific considerations of craft or medium.
Classic mainstream cinema has been no less simplistic in foregrounding suffering, neurotic or otherwise, as the wellspring of creativity. (In all fairness, apostles of high art in the academy were similarly inclined for many years, under the influence of Freudian pathobiographic theories advanced by Edmund Wilson (The Wound and the Bow) and others.) Tinseltown opuses such as A Song To Remember (l946) and Lust For Life (l956) prominently featured the sorrows precipitated by the artist's unruly nature, the wounding world or both. Bourgeois insensitivity and unrequited love were staples of the artistic biopic long before Kirk Douglas sheared an ear. The genre was also hallmarked by a stolid, by-the-numbers narrative trajectory. The artist's progress from cradle to usually untimely grave unfolded with every trauma and triumph canonically in place, as the Great Man struggled to fulfill his vision against the obstacles strewn in his path by fate and the Philistines (women were virtually excluded from the pantheon).
Francois Girard's absorbing 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould displays a humility Gide would surely have admired in its approach to the mysterious wholeness of the creative process. The director, Canadian like his subject, consistently abjures convenient psychologising as well as the relentless linearity of the typical "Great Man" film.
A child prodigy, Gould had been concertizing successfully in Canada since his early 'teens when he achieved instant international acclaim through an astonishing l955 recording of J.S. Bach's 32 Aria mit Virschienene Variationen (The Goldberg Variations). Taking the latter as his formal cue, Girard has created as many "variations" around the holograph of Gould's enigmatic character; exemplary, if sometimes fictive fragments which summon up events from the pianist's career and extra-musical life; actual or acted testimony by Gould, relatives, colleagues, friends, and passing acquaintances; reconstructions of futile attempts by adoring or impertinent journalists to crack his facade; cartoons (a stunning translation of a Bach fugue by the master Canadian animator Norman McLaren); even x-rays (vide infra).
Out of this melange, Girard weaves a complex tapestry of sight and sound which cunningly embodies its subject's consuming passion for counterpoint. The film's elliptical style also catches something of Gould's elusive self-presentation (although the apparent discursiveness actually conceals an impressive coherence). Gould is portrayed by Colm Feore, who bears him little physical resemblance, yet uncannily projects his lapidary intelligence, antic humor, and schizoid defensiveness. The simulated pyrotechnics of previous pianist biopics like A Song To Remember fostered the offputting impression of an actor playing at playing. Girard wisely opts not to have Feore touch a single key. The picture opens as Gould strides towards the camera across a vast Arctic waste. His isolation is exquisitely palpable, as well as an oddly bracing purposefulness. The Goldberg Aria/theme emerges faintly from the icy silence, as it were ex nihilo, then rises on a fade to black. Each subsequent "variation" encapsulates one or another facet of a deeply eccentric, yet attractive personality. Gould's accompanying performances, immensely affecting in their own right, by turns hectic, mordant, or transcendent, also provide exceptionally apt running commentary.
Some sequences constitute intensely compressed visual haiku. Others appraise the pianist at greater -- but not much greater -- length. Given a deliberate paucity of words, the able script by Girard and Don McKellar imparts a surprising amount of Gould's history -- and far more engagingly than a pedestrian biography of a few years back.
Lake Simcoe sketches out Gould's early background: his voiceover describes how a doting mother immersed him in music, sang to him in her womb, taught him to read notes before words. Immersion in this sonically enriched environment served to maximize an enormous innate musicality -- a fortuitous match which typified the early development of musical geniuses like Gustrave Mahler and Charles Ives (Stuart Feder comments upon the phenemonon at length in his admirable biography of Ives).
In hieratic strokes, Girard shows the toddler Gould nestled on his mother's lap at the piano, her hand guiding his finger -- the boy Gould, utterly alone by the lake, happily chattering out math tables (he happily mentions a precocious "facility with minutiae") -- the preadolescent Gould, listening raptly to the Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde on the radio. In the doorway, his mother hushes a father deftly depicted as peripheral to the formidable harmony between son and mother. Girard implies that peers may also have been thus excluded.
Time leaps: the adult Gould's
ferocious attentiveness is captured in Forty-Five Seconds And A Chair:
The camera moves into
his unblinking gaze, while
Bach's Two Part Invention #l3 marches towards its closing cadence -- upon
which his eyelids flutter shut and he faintly smiles: a miniscule, improbably
voluptuous ocular swoon. Gould once stated that his life was polarized
between reason and ecstasy. The dialectic is minted in Zen-like coin here
and elsewhere (e.g., in McLaren's animated meditation upon a Gould rendition
of a Bach Fugue: a field of white spheres divide, expand, and contract;
upon the fugue's resolution, a multicolored butterfly suddenly materializes
and hovers over the spheres' rigorous pavane).
As his reputation spread, Gould found himself in the untenable position of being a much sought-after performer for whom concertizing had become an intolerable ordeal. Acute vignettes document perennial complaints of bad hotels and worse pianos. His father had constructed a special chair which set him impossibly below the keys. He insisted upon taking it everywhere with him, as well as his own Steinways. In CD-3l8 -- the number of a Gould touring instrument -- Girard converts the actual piano's soundboard, dampers and strings into an elegant architectural abstraction which marvelously fleshes out the intricate architecture of a prelude from The Well Tempered Clavier).
Eventually Gould's appearance grew hobolike; hat, scarf, and gloves were worn year round against his perception of incessant chill. He soaked his hands constantly in hot water, neglected his diet, binged on arrowroot cookies, drowned food in ketchup. Throughout the film, his hypochondriacal behavior and otherwise odd doings are variously wondered at, criticized or rationalized. Realistic frailities are cited, a predisposition towards infection, allergies, so forth. One supporter maintains that Gould's idiosyncracies were never consciously intended to shock. He wanted "only to express..."
From the intricate layering of evidence a tragicomic picture emerges of the pianist's loopy, increasingly desperate attempts at rigid control against the sense of raw encroachments upon exquisitely drawn-out nerves. In the early Sixties, deeming performance in public a debasing charade, Gould quit the circuit altogether. He began assiduously pre-orchestrating what few interviews he granted. Not unexpectedly, in Gould Meets Gould he finds himself his most congenial interrogator, wryly recommending that the ideal ratio of artist to audience should be "one to zero". Although he enjoyed twitting the pretentious ring of his own pronunciamentos, he had seriously come to believe that the heart of a composer's intentions could only be plumbed in the recording studio, and was convinced that most musicians would be following his lead by the century's end. His opposition, which was not inconsiderable (and did not merely comprise Philistines) hooted that he had merely lost the courage to perform; or accused him of shameless manipulations on tape which could never have been achieved in reality (certainly not their reality). Sir Yehudi Menuhin, another child prodigy who savored concertizing as much as Gould loathed it, complains to Girard that Gould's approach was "too artificial" -- but wistfully adds that he was not Glenn Gould. As if to underscore the extremity of the pianist's detachment from the mundane, let alone the carping of colleagues, The Passion of Glenn Gould shows him in the recording studio, whirling and sculpting the air with his hands as the camera swoops around him. His blissed-out body english urges on the performance of the Bach French Suite he's just magnificently taped, while on the other side of the partition engineers babble on about the best way to serve coffee. Gould could be separated from them by galaxies rather than glass. (Circles and spirals are a recurrant visual motif in Girard's filmwork, alternately deployed to convey the height of Gould's eremitic creative ecstasy as in the sequence above, or the depths of his suffering. In L.A. Concert, a toady major-domo assails him with a host of dreary post-performance obligations; then he's guided up and around interminable flights of twisting stairs into the hall's staging area. A security guard asks for his autograph. With exquisite courtesy, Gould signs a program and tells him to hold on to it. This would be his last public appearance.)
But Gould did not so much abandon the outside world thereafter; rather he sought to manage it, to stave off potential intrusions and abrasions, real or imagined, with increasingly pathological vigor. As far as can be determined he loved only once, with terrifying intensity, a woman who could not possibly reciprocrate his affection. The loss may have contributed to his eventual withdrawal, and the inordinate care he came to exercise over his diminishing personal and professional relationships.
Eventually his major contacts away from the studio were conducted over the telephone. Into it he would obsessively pour his thoughts and theories at impossible hours and at unreasonable length, to people he would often later hurtfully amputate as inexplicably as they had been taken up.
That same obsessiveness continued to be magisterially invoked to shape the world to his art, by way of an extraordinary sensitivity to musical and non-musical sound. In Truck Stop, Gould's amazed ear tunes into one and another conversational strand of a diner's din. His finger moves just perceptibly -- conducting the babble! In The Tip, he hilariously hawks a "sure thing" from broker to bartender, then sits back to enjoy the swirl of rumor and false report he's engendered as much, if not more than the windfall he accomplishes (the accompaninment to this cascando of greed is the vertiginous Precipitato from Prokoviev's Sonata #7; Gould's rendition of a composer whose idiom one would have thought to lie well outside his interests is yet another unexpected pleasure.).
A radio buff since childhood, Gould used "found" material from the voices and sounds around him -- as in the two episodes above -- to create pioneering contrapuntal assemblages for the Canadian Broadcasting Company. Girard reprises the finest of these, The Idea of North, in which excerpts from interviews across the social spectrum are woven into an elegant, multivocal meditation upon the relationship between Canada's landscape and mindset. Gould's own independence, stubbornness, and isolation arguably represented a limit case of the national character: He once said he would relish spending a season above the Arctic circle. In a sense, he dwelt there all along.
Gould's ornery insistence on calling his own shots reached a morbid zenith in extravagant self-medicating for a plague of ills, hypochondriacal and actual. His escalating addiction surely contributed to an early death by a hypertensive stroke at age 5O. The psychological roots of Gould's dependency elicits little overt comment here. Instead, Girard meticulously documents the vicious cycle of drugs, side effects, more drugs, yet more horrific side effects -- another dark spiral; then, in Diary Of One Day, illustrates the febrile psychophysiological pitch of Gould's daily round with cinematic radiography, frenetically cutting back and and forth between a racing heart, blood pumping madly through cerebral vessels, skeletal hands clattering over an unseen keyboard, a bony shoulder girdle frantically abducting and adducting. One is left with the harrowing impression of relentless traumatization.
Like The Goldberg Variations, the film closes its final circle by ending where it began, as Gould strides back into the imponderable Arctic silence. Having discovered as much about him as one could in so brief a space, one might speculate glibly about the roles played by enormous native giftedness, by immense intellect, and by a possibly constitutional hypersensitivity to a wide range of stimuli in the construction of both madness and masterwork. One might theorize about the intense maternal symbiosis which bathed Gould literally from the womb onward in sensual sound, conceivably providing the basis for his submersion in music to the virtual exclusion of authentic intimacy, and perhaps dictating an ultimate symbolic submersion in the maternal, his pharmacothymic Liebestod, Yet, hearkening back to Gide, one cannot but feel that Gould has eluded capture here as successfully as when he lived -- and that Girard has intended this ambiguous outcome. Music miraculously spoke through Gould, but the why and how of it defies complete understanding. In Voyager, one learns that a Gould recording of Bach was sent into outer space to communicate proof of human existence and purpose. Gould himself could have fallen to earth from a star, so alien at times did his purposes seem. Yet, despite his awesome oddness and self-absorption, he never ceased trying to make us listen, however imperfectly, as he listened with such perfection.
In the Hamburg episode, he's holed up in a hotel, unable or unwilling to perform. After a furious argument with his agent, he suddenly presses a perplexed chambermaid to listen to the new record of his Beethoven sonatas. As an allegro spins out its gossamer melodic web, the young woman grows still, her eyes close -- and then she breaks into a tiny grin, to his vast delight. You see?, one senses him beaming, Yes, you see!
O rare Glenn Could!
REFERENCES
l. Freud, Sigmund. Leonardo Da Vinci: A Study In Sexuality. New York: Vintage/Random House, l955.
2. Friedrich, Otto: Glenn Gould. New York: Random House, l99O.
3. Feder, Stuart. Charles Ives: "My Father's Song": A Psychoanalytic Biography. New Haven, Yale University Press, l993.