(Michîle Hozer, Peter Raymont; Canada; 2009) A fairly standard biography of Glenn Gould's life and work. The viewer is familiarised with his upbringing, his quick ascendancy to fame, and then his rejection of its trappings in favour of a somewhat more reclusive life working on various projects that primarily interested him and not the taste of others. His eccentricities and peccadilloes are placed in the center of the film, although even if you have even smallest understanding of Gould, this angle was going to be extremely obvious. The film-makers did raise the interest levels by showing a gradual change in his eccentricity, from it possibly being a cultivated thing in his youth to perpetuate a kind of marketable myth, to it being a full-blown melancholic malady that truly afflicted his later life. Interesting use of archived footage on occasion, especially at the beginning when it seemed that the whole film was going to be composed of nothing but pieces of old footage of Gould.
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