Canadian pianist Glenn Gould (1933-1983) was a tortured artist to rival history’s greatest. Throughout the course of his life and career, Gould embodied this figure in its various incarnations. He morphed from the child prodigy to the eccentric, the recluse, the neurotic and the hypochondriac, his untimely death from a stroke at age 50 believed to be the result of an ongoing addiction to prescription meds.
Canadian pianist Glenn Gould (1933-1983) was a tortured artist to rival history’s greatest. Throughout the course of his life and career, Gould embodied this figure in its various incarnations. He morphed from the child prodigy to the eccentric, the recluse, the neurotic and the hypochondriac, his untimely death from a stroke at age 50 believed to be the result of an ongoing addiction to prescription meds. While there is no severed ear or suicide by double-barrelled shotgun in Gould’s legend, he could still give Van Gogh and Hemmingway a run for the title.
Documentary Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould explores Gould in these various guises. But unlike 1993’s 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould – a series of short vignettes which blend the facts and fictions surrounding Gould and his eccentricities – Genius Within attempts to debunk the mythology of Gould’s public persona. Piecing together old footage, recordings and photographs with contemporary interviews from his friends, colleagues and lovers, filmmakers Michèle Hozer and Peter Raymont ultimately create a portrait of a suffering genius who could only find solace in his art.
In chronological fashion, Genius Within charts the ascendance of Gould’s career, examining his early family life in Toronto, his enrolment in The Royal Conservatory of Music at age 11, his discovery by Columbia Records at 22 and his decision to quit performance at only 32, instead choosing to communicate artistically through only technologically mediated forms – a move that, in the 1960s, was highly shocking in the realms of classical music.
Simultaneously, the film examines the mythology which surrounds Gould as a public figure – his strikingly handsome yet dishevelled appearance, his idiosyncratic style of performance (sitting hunched on a chair only 13 inches from the ground), his various eccentricities (such as obsessively soaking his hands and wearing gloves, scarves and overcoats in the height of summer), and his increasingly obsessive, solitary and even paranoiac nature.
Genius Within is standard tortured artist fare, but it does it well. It is an engaging and well-edited documentary, providing insight into both Gould’s work, and the public/private life that shaped it.
