intellectual exercises
by Douglas Messerli
François Girard and Don McKellar (screenplay),
François Girard (director) Thirty Two
Short Films about Glenn Gould / 1993
Gould, declaring the concert hall to be similar to a sports arena, ended
his performing career eighteen years before his death, announcing after a
concert at the Wilshire Ebell Theater in Los Angeles in 1964, that he would never
perform again. The film that portrays this momentous decision shows a composed
and friendly Gould, asking a stage hand how many years he had worked and
willingly signing a program for his wife. Throughout much of his performing
career, Gould had not been so affable, and was known for cancelling concerts or
simply not showing up. Just before a concert with the New York Philharmonic,
Leonard Bernstein announced to his audience, "Don't be frightened, Mr.
Gould is here and will appear in a moment."
That decision obviously created a flurry of reactions, which the Gould
character spoofs in the short piece, "Gould Meets Gould," where he
plays the role of a critical interviewer to whom he responds in like. In
another short piece violinist Yehudi Menuhin, agrees that performing is often
difficult, the sound of each hall varying, the temperatures radically
differing, etc., but notes that, unlike Gould, who treated his playing as an
"intellectual exercise," that Menuhin craves and enjoys the company
of his audiences.
With the end of his performing career, Gould, far from retiring, devoted
his time to recordings, using many of the new technological developments to
enhance his performances. One of the most humorous of Girard's short takes on
Gould portrays one such recording session, where in one room Gould listens to
the tape of what he has apparently just played, while behind the glass
partition the technicians speak loudly about various unrelated topics,
including food.
As Girard makes clear, Gould was often neurotic. Throughout most of his
life we wore a coat and gloves, no matter what the temperature, and demanded
rooms be highly heated. He complained of a number of ailments, few of which
were detected in the autopsy upon his death. As the film reveals, he took a
wide range of prescription medicines, however, as he proclaims, "not all
at one time." Driving across the country, he listened to top-ten music,
despite averring a dislike of popular music. His major method of communication
with others was the telephone, which he would use to suddenly call family and
friends to speak for hours at a time or call to report, as he does in one short
film, that he has had a dream about Arnold Schoenberg.
Gould also wrote numerous articles about music and other subjects, and
performed on Canadian radio. A selection from his radio documentary, "The
Idea of North," is represented, as he gathers voices much in the way one
might tonal registers of music. Similarly, Girard shows us one of his trips to
Gould's favorite diner, Fran's Restaurant, where he simultaneously listens into
the conversations of several different customers as he eats his regular, scrambled
eggs and catsup.
Clearly Gould himself was aware of his numerous eccentricities, both
mocking them and celebrating them. In the short "Ad" he jokingly puts
himself forward as one might in a "lonely hearts" advertisement:
Wanted: friendly,
companionably reclusive, socially unacceptable,
alcoholically abstemious,
tirelessly talkative, zealously unzealous,
spiritually intense,
minimally turquoise, maximally ecstatic moon,
seeks moth or moths with
similar qualities for purposes of telephonic
seduction, Tristanesque
trip-taking, and permanent flame-fluttering,
no photos required, financial
status immaterial, all ages and
non-competitive vocations
considered, applicants should furnish
sets of sample conversation
with notarized certification of
marital disinclination,
references re: low decibel vocal consistency,
itinerary and sample receipts
from previous successfully completed
out-of-town moth flights, all
submissions treated confidentially...
Because of his seemingly
"puritan-like" behavior and his own statements of his being "The
Last Puritan," some had suspected that Gould was homosexual, but some
years after this film, Cornelia Foss, wife of artist Lukas Foss, revealed that
she had a four-and-a-half-year relationship with him, assuring others that
"he was an extremely heterosexual man."
Of course, that is based on the presumption that we are all binary
individuals, either one thing or another, and as Girard has made quite clear in
the very structure of his film, Gould was simultaneously many things,
Los Angeles, June 6, 2012
Reprinted
from World
Cinema Review (June
2012).
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