Word: goulds
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...Glenn Gould was at once a passionate musical genius and a neurotic compulsive freak. As quickly as he polished off a Bach variation, he would also consume arrowroot cookies with ketchup, voraciously take tranquilizers by the dozen and spend hours on the telephone calling anyone at anytime just to talk. In his elliptically eccentric little film, director Francois Girard composes a series of thirty-two short compositions that capture the intense peculiarities of the pianist's insanely tortured and brilliant life. The director's minimalist documentary style, while ostensibly unassuming, is as intense as the Gouldian world it unfolds...
...offbeat style of the film neatly mirrors the inner turmoils and ecstasies of Gould's life. Gould's career took off in the 1950s, and the camera captures the mad rise of his passionate affair with the piano. In an unearthly scene, Gould is pictured flowing through the music studio room, listening to his own recording and enraptured in his act of creation. He is in his own transcendent world. In all its obsessiveness, this charged erotic encounter vies with Hollywood's best...
With the same close acuity for both detail and the grand sweep of the virtuoso, the film quietly captures these escapist tendencies of Gould, whether in his music or in the private spaces of his life. In one stunningly bizarre scene we see Gould approaching us across the snow-clad tundra. The distance and the alienation of his character from us the audience--humanity--is painful, almost violent. The ice and loneliness of the geography are a fitting metaphor for Gould's life as an artist...
...Gould's overwhelming need to flee from the world reached a climax when he decided not to perform live. His obsessive-compulsive nature overcame him, and he descended into the private world of the studio. It is this decision that created Gould's legendary persons--as he became even more remote, the myths of his life increased. At the same time, it suggests the hermetic and elite manner in which Gould lived his life. The brutal facts of Gould's life serve to emphasize the destructive aspects of his genius. He turned obsessively in on himself, and this voracious introspection...
Harvard professor Stephen Jay Gould painstakingly critiques this sordid history in his oft-praised book "The Mismeasure of Man." As Gould notes, American scientist H. H. Goddard wrote in 1919 that superior intelligence ensures social dominance: "Democracy is a method for arriving at a truly benevolent aristocracy." While America has changed significantly through the century, Murray's argument is eerily reminiscent of earlier dubious claims...