A few weeks before the holiday season kicked in, the local Cinémathèque posted a schedule of their upcoming films and on the list was François Girard’s Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould. At some point, likely in a film class, I’d been shown a few of the “short films” from the larger work but had been meaning to catch up with the rest of it (it’s been sitting in my Zip queue since I joined the service) so I jumped at the opportunity to see it.

Seeing Girard’s film reminded me a great deal of The Silence Before Bach (our review) and it’s clear that Pere Portabella has taken a few hints from Girard’s film and really, it’s all very incestuous. Gould loved Bach; Portabella’s film is on Bach and if that’s not enough, Gould seems to be all over the radio this week with CBC’s current “49 Songs from North of the 49th Parallel”; Gould’s a popular nomination.

According to my film-going companion, who happens to be a bit of a Gould expert, the film fails to incorporate some of the artist’s more fascinating (and eccentric) details but it does provide a nice introduction for the un-initiated and I certainly walked away knowing more about Gould than when I went in. It was also wonderful to see Colm Feore, an actor I like but who I simply don’t see enough of, in his younger days

The film, which is nearly impossible to find on DVD, is on-line, in its entirety, for free. It’s not exactly “legal” but someone has posted it to YouTube in 32 parts (how convenient!) and you can start enjoying the goodness with Part 1.

I’ll leave you with my favourite segments, “Hamburg” and “Forty-Five Seconds and a Chair”: