Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (1993) on Netflix
Short pieces trace the life of the pianist Glenn Gould. They include a childhood at a cottage near Lake Simcoe and a self-interview about leaving the concert stage.
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- Netflix4.1/5
- IMDb7.3/104,278 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes92%
Trailer
Plot summary
Glenn Gould's life unfolds as a run of short pieces rather than a single story. Some are interviews with people who knew him, others reenact episodes. He remembers the family cottage near Lake Simcoe, where he reads music before books and learns Bach from his mother. By five he has decided to become a concert pianist, though he believes his mother had already made that choice for him. In a self-interview he asks himself why he stopped giving concerts at thirty-two and chose to reach listeners through media instead. He tells himself that a musician is always an autocrat, however kind.
Cast
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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (1993)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Screenwriter Don McKellar, chosen by Niv Fichman and François Girard for his musical education, at first refused to adapt Gould's life, calling it "an undramatic life", and was won over only by Girard's idea of 32 short films.
- Actor Colm Feore prepared to play Glenn Gould by watching available video and listening to Gould's recordings, and also read through 6,000 of Gould's letters.
- For principal photography, Gould's genuine Steinway grand piano was moved into a church in Toronto, and the scenes set in Northern Canada were filmed at Lake Saint Pierre in December 1992.
- The seventh-season Simpsons episode "22 Short Films About Springfield", which aired on 14 April 1996, took its title as a homage to Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould.
- François Girard chose to model the screenplay for Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould after Bach's Goldberg Variations, the piece Glenn Gould had performed.
- The animation used in the "Gould Meets McLaren" segment was not new: it is clipped from Norman McLaren's film Spheres, published in 1969.
