Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould

EXCLUSIVE LIMITED RUN!  │  

an>New 35mm PRINT!  │ Director François Girard and co-writer Don McKellar (who teamed up again for 1998’s much-honoured The Red Violin) reinvented film biography in this remarkable 1993 feature, one of the most innovative and original Canadian films ever made. Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould takes as its subject the provocative life and work of the late pianist who was one of Canada’s national treasures. Girard and McKellar eschew both conventional drama and conventional documentary for a unique approach that delivers precisely what the title promises: 32 short films — dramatizations, interviews, experiments — about Gould. The 32-segment structure is modelled on Bach’s Goldberg Variations, one of Gould’s most celebrated recordings. Only 31 of the 32 vignettes are new; the other, Spheres, is the 1969 Norman McLaren animated short scored by Gould. The movie’s fresh and felicitous method succeeds altogether wonderfully, illuminating and capturing the enigma of Gould’s eccentric genius in a way that a more conventional approach surely could not. Roger Ebert recently cited this “brilliant” film as a precedent for the kaleidoscopic methods of I’m Not There (2007), Todd Haynes’s radically unorthodox Bob Dylan biopic. Thirty Two Short Films is a beautifully shot, richly intelligent, inspiring, audacious work full of epiphanies and poignancy, and featuring a tour-de-force turn by Colm Feore (Trudeau; Bon Cop, Bad Cop) in the central role. Winner of 1993 Genies for Best Film, Director, Cinematography, and Editing, and a Pacific Cinémathèque pick as one of the ten best films of the 1990s, Thirty Two Short Films screens here in a new 35mm print made possible by the Toronto International Film Festival Group’s Canadian Open Vault initiative. Colour, 35mm. 100 mins.

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Plays in a double bill with François Truffaut's The Wild Child.
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