Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould: The Screenplay

Desmond Maley is the music librarian at the J.W. Tate Library,
Huntington College, Laurentian University and editor of the Newsletter
of the Canadian Association of Music Libraries, Archives, and
Documentation Centres.

One wonders why this screenplay was published. True, the film Thirty-two
Short Films About Glenn Gould won several awards on the international
film festival circuit following its premiere in 1993. But the
screenplay, although it is well-constructed, contains nothing that is
particularly new or even noteworthy. In 32 brief vignettes, we traverse
such familiar Gouldian terrain as his short-lived career as a concert
pianist and his decision to abandon the stage in favor of recording,
writing and broadcasting. We meet violinist Yehudi Menuhin, who worked
with Gould, as well as the Bruno Monsaingeon quartet, which performs
Gould’s first published composition. Gould’s aesthetics are touched
upon—for example, his demand for ecstasy in musical performance and
his insistence on the necessity of solitude for creativity. We are also
treated to glimpses of his private life, including his penchant for
playing the stock market and his development of a dependence on
prescription drugs.

But all of this material has been discussed in greater depth in books
like Geoffrey Payzant’s Glenn Gould: Music and Mind (1978) or Otto
Friedrich’s Glenn Gould: A Life and Variations (1989). The impression
we are left with is the standard one of Gould as a man in a vacuum. No
effort, for instance, is made to shed light on the early years of
Gould’s intellectual formation, when he was a student at the Royal
Conservatory of Music in Toronto. This is an area of his life that
deserves more exploration. Only the most determined aficionados of
Gouldiana will want to have the screenplay once the film becomes
available on video.