Gould is one of those
men who can repay numerous biographical
and documentary approaches. This is
hardly the first film on him of course
and it assuredly won’t be the last.
Something in him fascinates, moves,
amuses, tantalises – and maybe also
repels. The twin poles of concert performance
and recorded artefact are ones that
run throughout the latter part of his
short life, the two inexorably reaching
a state of mutual antagonism. For Gould
public performance was a wretched thing
so he simply ceased to submit himself
to it. Audiences were "a force
of evil" and the whole concert
environment produced a "lack of
imagination." In the studio Gould
felt there was a vacuum, a "linearity
of time circumvented" in a Gouldianly
adroit phrase that never quite manages
to pin the butterfly of his perversity.
Bruno Monsaingeon once
again looks at his subject – he’s written
books and made numerous television documentaries
about Gould - but this time from a novel
perspective, that of Gouldian disciples
or pilgrims; the title of the film is
already spiritually suggestive enough.
Though the spoken material is entirely
in Gould’s own words we hear from a
number of women, and one man, to whom
Gould has been a sort of musical or
spiritual idée fixe. A Russian
woman speaks of him in something of
the same way that Muscovites welcomed
Horowitz in 1986, as a kind of saviour,
a deus ex machina; only in Gould’s case
he had been long dead before the woman
heard his discs, Bach inevitably. A
young Englishwoman has a tattoo of some
bars of Gould’s string quartet on her
lower back. A Japanese woman never received
a reply to a letter she sent to him.
A copy exists but was never posted to
her; it is duly reunited with its putative
recipient these many years later and
duly translated for her, to her amazed
delight.
In all these cases
there’s a yearning communion with an
almost disembodied self. It’s as if
Gould himself, incorporeal, has assumed
quasi-divine status for them. This would
have doubtless amused Menuhin who famously
recorded with Gould and famously clashed
here with the all-too-human, all-too-intransigent
and all-too-prickly Gould. Inevitably
the subject was the old question of
recording and performing. Menuhin’s
reasonable generosity met with adolescent
petulance from Gould, for whom assertion
didn’t always mean explication. Perhaps
there’s a clue in a throwaway comment
he makes elsewhere – that there is too
much "cheating" at concerts.
Or maybe the prosaic truth is that he
was simply bored and drained by the
process of concerto and recital giving
and sought a combative binary opposition
the better to rationalise the futility
of it. Blaming the audience absolves
oneself, of course.
The schema of the mainly
female disciples – though it’s not quite
presented as such – adds spine to a
documentary that is in any case fascinating
enough. Gould is invariably fascinating,
whether squaring up to Menuhin or submitting
with cavalier boredom to a press photographer.
There are numerous shots of Gould in
performance, many rare and private,
whether with Russell Oberlin in Bach,
with Menuhin in Schoenberg or with orchestral
colleagues such as conductor Paul Sherman.
An actor enacts Gould’s half-forlorn
Canadian railway journey as we hear
another declaim Gould’s own words. We
are in a sense both taken in and taken
out of Gould. The charm and the glamour
"didn’t last long" and the
dreadful life, of which he spoke with
such asperity, was the phantom life,
the one he might have lived, had not
the all-night sessions, the early morning
telephone calls, the Gouldian hermetic,
consumed him.
With Monsaingeon’s
own testimonial – he also plays violin
in a segment from Gould’s string quartet
a work he plainly admires highly for
its lyricism - and the presentation
of archival material this becomes a
curiously compelling half-portrait of
a chimerical presence. If Gould is more
alive now than ever, as Monsaingeon
avers, then we can thank the recordings.
But he also lives on through interviews
and through words and this latest documentary
brings his paradoxical self to life
once more.
Jonathan Woolf
for details 
A Film by Bruno Monsaingeon 
IDEALE AUDIENCE INTERNATIONAL DVD9DM20 [106.00]
