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Criterion Collection5
Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould
Colm Feore (Glenn Gould); François Girard (director and screenplay), Niv Fichman (producer), Don McKellar (screenplay)
The Criterion Collection, New 4K digital restoration, 2025
François Girard’s 1993 movie, Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, is perhaps more talked-about than watched these days. It’s an iconic Canadian film about a Canadian musical icon that’s influenced filmmakers from Quentin Tarantino to the creators of The Simpsons. (There’s an episode of the latter called 22 Short Films About Springfield.) The film may be about to get a second lease on life with a sumptuous new video release from the Criterion Collection which features a 4K UHD remaster of the film from a 35mm original and a new 5.1 sound track also remastered from 35mm. There’s also a mass of old and new supporting material. It’s being issued as a two-disc set with the film in 4K UHD on one disc and the other, a standard Blu-ray, with the film as well as all the extra features.
It’s a very beautiful and clever film with a brilliant screenplay by Girard and Don McKellar. It is indeed in 32 short segments of various genres. Some scenes are reconstructions of episodes in Gould’s life using diaries, letters, and so on for text. In these, Colm Feore does a superb job of playing Gould. Some of the scenes are interviews with people who knew Gould, from his piano tuner through to Yehudi Menuhin. Others are quite abstract. Highlights for me included Gould Meets Gould, which is a kind of surrealistic interview of Gould by himself where he dissects his view of the relationship between the performance hall and the recording studio in terms of power relationships and McLuhan’s theories of communication.
Balancing this is Questions With No Answers, which features the somewhat frazzled interviewer-side of telephone interviews with Gould where we hear the questions, but not the responses. But this is only one of many segments that deal with Gould’s shocking decision at the time to give up live performance, the decision over which Menuhin felt Gould made too much moral heavy weather.
Other aspects of Gould’s life are also explored: his obsession with the space and solitude of the Canadian North; his bizarre hypochondria and the bewildering array of medications he took (who was prescribing them?); his obsession with numerology and dreams. Curiously, his famous love for animals rates only about half a line of dialogue. All in all, the film slowly builds a complex mosaic of who Gould was and what he stood for that stands up well 30 years later.
Visually and sonically, too, it’s quite striking. Some of the cinematography is compelling, especially Aria which opens and closes the film and features Gould walking across a vast expanse of frozen Lake Simcoe. Music, unsurprisingly, plays a key role. Twenty-three of the films are accompanied by recordings of Gould himself; the rest feature music by, among others, Wagner, Richard Strauss and Gould’s own String Quartet Op.1. There are full details for the musical numbers in the closing credits.
The extras are generous. There are two older documentaries about the making of the film and the original Goldwyn pictures theatrical trailer. There’s an insightful interview with Colm Feore about the challenges of “becoming Glenn Gould.” But the best thing (other than the film itself) is a rather long, recent conversation between Atom Egoyan and François Girard about the film’s origins—how it came to be made; how key esthetic and technical decisions were made; but also the politics, in the 1990s, of a Quebec filmmaker making a film about an (almost sacred) Ontario icon. It’s well worth watching.
As a total package, it’s pretty much flawless and should appeal to anyone with an interest in Glenn Gould or the Canadian cultural landscape of the 1990s.
The Criterion trailer can be found here.
