32 Short Films About Glenn Gould is a film I’ve been pretty obsessed with every since I saw it. Like Attempts on Her Life, it’s a disjointed, ambiguous, left field way to go about knowing a person, in this film’s case the pianist Glenn Gould.
The movie, as the title suggests, presents 32 short films that are all in some way “about” Glenn Gould. I put that in quotation marks because some of the scenes have very little to literally do with Mr. Gould, it may seem. Some of the pieces are about people in his life, some of them feature recordings of his music, some of them seem completely abstract. But, it all adds up to a very deep, if allusive, exploration of Mr. Gould as an artist, a person, and a container for meaning.
Attempts on Her Life could definitely be thought of as 17 Short Plays About a Woman Named Anne. The presence of the woman at the center of the play comes and goes, but it’s all an attempts to draw a deeply evocative picture of her and explore the many ways in which we might do so.
Below is 1 Short Film About Glenn Gould. It’s sadly difficult to find on DVD, but if you visit YouTube, you can view several more of the 32.