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CAPSULE: THIRTY TWO SHORT FILMS ABOUT GLENN GOULD (1993)

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DIRECTED BY: François Girard

FEATURING: Colm Feore

PLOT: A patchwork of short vignettes explores the allure of the eccentric piano virtuoso.

Still from thirty two short films about glenn gould (1993)

COMMENTS: I discovered my all-time favorite recording, Glenn Gould’s complete “The Well-Tempered Clavier,” and François Girard’s Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould at about the same time. I can’t definitively remember which I encountered first: my guess would be Girard’s film, because it is such an effective advertisement for Gould’s genius that it seems likely to have inspired a purchase. On the other hand, it’s entirely possible that I saw there was a film out about this marvelous pianist who accompanied his nimble fingers with ecstatic spontaneous humming,  breathing humanity into Bach’s precise baroque miniatures, and knew I had to learn more about this man. I do know that Gould’s “Clavier” was reissued in on CD in 1993, likely to coincide with this film, and I love to imagine I actually picked up that set from Tower Records and rented a VHS of Thirty Two Films from my local mom and pop video store on the same weekend in 1993 or 1994.

The movie does what it says on the tin (although some might object to calling the closing credits a “short film.”) The sequences break down into four main categories: documentary-style interviews with friends and co-workers, dramatic reenactments of events in the pianist’s life, adaptations of Gould’s own works, and abstract experimental sketches. The interviews are illuminating, and give the film its hybrid documentary character. The dramatic scenes form the bulk of the movie. They follow in a roughly chronological format, but do not tell a continuing story: each is a standalone vignette. Memorable moments show Gould corralling his hotel chambermaid to listen to his hot-off-the-presses LP and the Gould mesmerized by contrapuntal conversations he hears in a diner. A performance of “String Quartet, Opus 1,” one of his few original compositions, an excerpt from the word collage “The Idea of North,” and a dramatization of a portion of his puckish essay “Glenn Gould Interviews Glenn Gould About Glenn Gould” ground us in the legend’s actual creative output. The experimental shorts constitute the most intriguing category, although there are only five or six of them (considering how you count). They include closeups of Gould’s own CD318 piano in action, hammers striking the soundboard, illustrating the physical geometry of the sonic construction; a scene of Gould playing the piano in x-ray vision; and “Gould Meets McLaren,” a 1969 animated short (originally entitled “Spheres”) that shows globes popping into existence, dancing symmetrically across the screen, and dividing like eggs undergoing musical mitosis as Gould plays a Bach fugue.

I once defined bopic as “a movie genre that’s not accurate enough to be documentary or interesting enough to be fiction.” One of the most formulaic and cliched film formats, the celebrity biography only really works when it is heavily fictionalized, as in Amadeus or Lisztomania (which, coincidentally, both involve classical musicians). Thirty Two Short Films shatters the mold of this generally insipid movie genre. There are enough talking head reminiscences to capture the spirit of the man, but not so many that it appears lazy. Girard solves the genre’s central problem—the fact that messy human lives rarely fit neatly into three act structures with unified themes—by ignoring narrative almost entirely. This collage portraiture method captures its subject more faithfully than a “realist” approach would. When we think back on people we know, we recall them as a collection of moments and characteristics; we don’t think of them as a contiguous life story. Glenn Gould was the piano prodigy and the hypochondriac and the man who went everywhere wrapped in a coat and gloves and scarf and the man who called up his friends late at night and talked their ears off and the virtuoso who developed a hatred for performing and the monster who put ketchup on his eggs and the genius and the possibly asexual hermit. He is at least thirty two separate stories, and this seemingly chaotic collection of vignettes creates a portrait of a real person far better than a tick-tock chronology or a forced storyline would. Plus, the music is, naturally, great, and what Gould himself likely would have wanted us to focus on; his passion shines through every segment, turning almost anyone into a classical music fan for at least 90 minutes. Glenn Gould is a strong contender for the greatest biopic ever made.

Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould entered the Criterion Collection in June 2025 on 4K UHD and Blu-ray. Of course it is a new 4K director approved transfer. Of course it comes with a booklet (a nice fold out broadsheet with titles and scenes from the shorts on the other side) with an informative essay (from Michael Koresky.) Of course it has a director’s commentary (Girard is joined by co-writer Don McKellar). Other extras include a thirty minute conversation between Girard and fellow Canadian director Atom Egoyan, archival interviews with star Colm Feore and producer Niv Fichman, and a two part 1959 television portrait called “Glenn Gould: Off the Record” and “Glenn Gould: On the Record.”

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…because of the deadening uniformity of the genre, Girard’s film appears all the more miraculous in retrospect. From its rigorous and deliberately distancing structural gambit to its restless stylistic experimentations, Thirty Two Short Films proves that biopics needn’t color within the lines to effectively portray their subjects.”–Derek Smith, Slant (Blu-ray)

[(This movie was nominated for review, without further comment, by “Anonymous.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (The Criterion Collection) [4K UHD]

Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (The Criterion Collection) [4K UHD]
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Capsules

CAPSULE: PALMS (1993)

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Ладони, AKA Ladoni

DIRECTED BY: Artour Aristakisyan

PLOT: A man tries to connect with his unborn son by seeing glimpses of him in the faces of people he meets in the slums of late-Soviet Moldova.

Still from Palms (1993)

COMMENTS: Palms is a pseudo-documentary black-and-white film shot single-handedly by Artour Aristakisyan over five years in Chisinau, Moldova. It is a haunting journey through faith, identity, and what it means to exist. When it was first screened in Moscow in the early 1990s, it blindsided everyone. Few people saw it, but those who did will never forget it. Even compared to other eccentric Russian films of Soviet parallel cinema or necrorealism, Palms is something else entirely. But unlike the ironic works of Yevgeny Yufit or Andrei I., Palms overflows with intense passion and austere ideology.

The film is composed of ten short stories about real people—beggars, psychiatric patients, oddballs, cripples, and others—who behave like “Bodies without Organs” (a concept from philosopher Gilles Deleuze). So, who are these people? There’s an unwashed woman who has supposedly lain on the ground for 40 years, waiting for Jesus. A boy who swore not to move until the Kingdom of Heaven arrives. An old woman who clings to the severed head of an SS officer—her lover—a clear nod to both Salome and Judith. A grandfather who collects trash from the dead, with “the border of Israel running across his face.” A man named Srulik, who kisses a dove—an allusion to the Holy Spirit.

Each kooky character, with their own tragic story, is woven into a cryptic narrative voiced by the filmmaker, who speaks as “the Father” addressing his “Unborn Son,” a child about to be aborted (an allusion to “the Logos” —Jesus before the Incarnation). The Father (voiced by Aristakisyan himself) is the only speaking character in the film. The central theme of his calm, solemn narration is a deep distrust of the material world, which is portrayed as inherently evil. Earth, in this worldview, is the creation of the Demiurge—a false god behind all societal systems. Although Aristakisyan claims he followed these drifters, outcasts, and madmen for five years and wrote down what they said, it’s clear that many of them are figments of his imagination.

Though the film seems disconnected from any specific cinematic tradition, Palms shares thematic affinities with early Christian thought, including Pauline theology and the Bogomil heresy. “Father Aristakisyan” proclaims:

“This is the System. It doesn’t have borders anymore. The System will find you wherever you go. So, kid, before it’s too late, focus on your salvation. You have your own light. Use it, and you’ll escape the System. For now, don’t get distracted by all this nonsense. No, don’t think about traveling abroad. After death, you’ll have plenty of time to travel. Your next baptism will be by fire. And then it’ll be too late to pick a side.”

To the Paulicians, everything on Earth was the work of Sataniel—the Demiurge, the god of the Old Testament. Jesus Christ, in contrast, was the Good God, made of “subtle” matter. They viewed Christ as a kind of phantom, not truly human—an idea known as docetism, associated with Serapion of Antioch. Aristakisyan’s concept of the System aligns with this Paulician worldview: not merely a political structure, but something much larger. It’s not socialism or capitalism, or even human society as such. The System is the entire material realm—factories, asylums, homes, and everything else.

Ironically, Aristakisyan (or his on-screen persona) even ridicules the vastness of outer space:

“I’m worried about you, kid. The sky used to be a protective ceiling—obviously made of foil. It kept me safe from the cosmos and all the crap in it. When I lived under the sky, maybe some of my thoughts didn’t come true. Now, every thought becomes real. It’s like cancer spreading everywhere, but a special kind of cancer. It keeps the body alive so the corpse can keep generating energy.”

In a nod to earlier critiques of modernity, the film hits the audience with an almost didactic intensity. Aristakisyan’s vision of the System is a heady mix of conspiracy theory and mystical philosophy, creating a spellbinding and unsettling atmosphere throughout. Thirty years later, the leading ideologist of Russian fascism, Alexander Dugin, would echo some of these themes: “The Outer Space exploration is godless and shameful. It’s a globalist fantasy preparing for the Antichrist. The Outer Space is an illusion. We need to stay faithful to Christ and the Russian land.”

The film recalls the small, priestless sects that emerged in 18th-century Russia, some of which still survive in remote regions like the Evenk taiga or the Trans-Volga steppes. One such group, the Golbeshniki, believed society itself was the kingdom of Lucifer. They buried themselves in mysterious earthen dens, burned their children in dark rites, and danced naked in the moonlight.

Despite its Paulician creed and somber tale, the film breathes of something far greater. The pallid and dappled hues that stain the frame, the wretched hovels of Chișinău, and the tranquil voice of the author together weave a spell most strange. A beauty not of this earth steals o’er the senses, ensnaring the soul in such wise that to look away becomes a sorrowful task indeed.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“[Palms’] approach certainly risks exploiting, aestheticising or exoticising human suffering. Instead, the film decontextualises its subjects without suggesting that the suffering it depicts is either unreal or picturesque. Rendering the historical as the trans-historical here functions to set extant reality into question.”–Hannah Proctor, ‘So-called waste’: Forms of Excess in Post-1960 Art, Film, and Literature’ (lecture)

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: JOHNNY AQUARIUS (1993)

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Jancio Wodnik; AKA Johnnie the Aquarius, Johnny Waterman

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DIRECTED BY: Jan Jakub Kolski

FEATURING: Franciszek Pieczka, Grazyna Blecka-Kolska, Boguslaw Linda, Katarzyna Aleksandrowicz

Still from Johnny aquarius

PLOT: An old farmer leaves his young wife and sets forth on a journey through the countryside to fulfill a higher purpose; along the way, he discovers that he possesses healing abilities, and he abandons his family in favor of the cult springs that springs up around him.

COMMENTS: You have to be a little forgiving of fables. They’re not to be taken literally, of course. If a character in a fable behaves badly, well, that’s the whole point; they will get their comeuppance, and we’ll all learn an important lesson. And if the story dabbles in fantasy, with magic or hints of the supernatural, that only magnifies the examination of humanity at the heart of the tale.

So it was with all my might that I tried to keep from getting unreasonably mad at the hero of Jańcio Wodnik, who turns his back on his family in search of deeper meaning and is soon corrupted by arrogance and obsequious adulation. After all, when we first meet poor Jańcio, he’s experiencing a spiritual crisis. His young wife has not managed to get pregnant, despite the fact that she has hung upside down 11 separate times in order to get his seed to the right spot. He’s beginning to lose his trust in gravity in other ways, too, having watched water flowing up a ladder to fill a bird’s nest. The only thing left to do is go out on a pilgrimage, bearing on his back nothing but a washing tub to keep his feet clean, which is a bit of an obsession for him. His devoted wife Weronka kindly lets him go, singing a song of sadness but understanding as he departs. If she’s not angry with him, what right have I to be?

It is curious how quickly Jańcio breaks bad. When he first meets Stygma, a roving motorcyclist who picks up extra cash here and there by piercing his hands with nails and showing up in local towns as the crucified Christ, he seems unimpressed with the blasphemy. But he also suspects that there’s something special in his foot washing, and when he offers to help the sick and the lame, the shocking thing isn’t that his ablutions work, or that Stygma will look for ways to capitalize on these gifts, or even that a small community of worshipers will descend upon him with gifts of money, sex, and adulation. No, what takes your breath away is how easily Jańcio succumbs to pride and hubris. He returns to his old home like a Roman emperor, telling his now-pregnant wife how utterly unimportant she is, and bestowing upon her the dubious gift of a car (which is carried on a litter by a phalanx of strongmen). It’s a striking sight, witnessing the simple man rendered cruel and haughty by his power. Surely his fall will be a sight to behold. 

The turn comes quickly, as his son is born with a tail and impervious to his ministrations. Indeed, all of his cures are quickly undone, and he is so dumbstruck by his folly that he sits motionless outside his house, unperturbed by the snow or the leaves or even the birds that nest upon his head. Years pass before a vision awakens him out of his stupor and returns him to face his wife and child. And the moral of this tale? Well, that’s perhaps the most unexpected twist of all, because it turns out that the cause of all this folly lies in a vignette that appears at the start of the film and is referenced once again before roaring to life in the final scenes: a sickly horse has been sent away from its farm to die alone, and in a truly strange bit of backfilling, Jańcio angrily confronts the horse’s owner (whom we have never seen before) to tell him that this bit of cruelty is single-handedly responsible for all of the misfortune that has followed. Jańcio Wodnik sets itself up to be a fable about gullibility or the dangers of taking on false holiness, and then out of nowhere hits you with Chekhov’s Horse.

Jańcio Wodnik is a light parable, charming but ultimately with no weight to it. A fable doesn’t have to be heavy-handed, but it feels like it should leave you wiser than you were before it began. Weronka does teach us to be steadfast and true, and Jańcio warns us against getting too big for your britches. But the lesson of “don’t turn out your sick horse or an old man will abandon his family and believe himself to be anointed by God” doesn’t exactly give Aesop a run for his money.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a slight but unusual charmer sustained by fine perfs and an inventive script… Recurrent joy of the pic is how all the crazy goings-on are treated as absolutely normal by the peasants.” – Derek Elley, Variety

(This movie was nominated for review by haui. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Johnny Aquarius

Johnny Aquarius
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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, Shorts

THEY CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE FOOL AND THE FLYING SHIP (1991) / MOUSE SOUP (1993)

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The tradition of celebrities narrating children’s literature is as old as recorded media itself; the first thing Thomas Edison ever recorded on the phonograph was his own recitation of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” Ever since then, plopping their children down in front of a famous person reading a book has been tried-and-true escape for parents. It’s a win for everyone: the kids get literature, the parents get distraction, and the celebrities receive a low-pressure gig with major PR upside. Not for nothing has SAG-AFTRA provided a helpful archive of famous storytellers, and if you needed another reason to hope for a speedy resolution to the ongoing strike (#sagaftrastrong #wgastrong), then it’s to save the world from recitations of kidlit by narrators with a lesser pedigree like, say, this guy.

Today, we present two such star-powered endeavors, each of which reflect the character of their narrators, but which tap into weirdness through their design as much as through the stories themselves. 

This is particularly true of “The Fool and the Flying Ship,” which features Robin Williams doing his best impression of an immigrant Jewish Eastern European grandfather unspooling an old folktale about a young schlub who sets out to win the hand of a princess by fulfilling a number of impossible conditions set forth by the King. The only thing the ridiculous young man has going for him is his innate friendliness, but that proves a decisive advantage, as he assembles a retinue of similarly odd companions who are unusually well-suited to meeting the King’s challenges. The film is a product of Rabbit Ears Entertainment, a storytelling outfit responsible for numerous memorable celebrity narrations (foremost among them Jack Nicholson’s peerless rendering of some of Rudyard Kipling’s “Just-So Stories”), but “Flying Ship” stands out as a notably odd entry. Williams’ raucous recounting of the tale frequently feels improvised, with snarky asides and deadpan diversions (perhaps best-exemplified by the casual dismissal of the Fool’s two older brothers), and the rollicking score by The Klezmer Conservatory Band mirrors his energy. The story itself is happily unweighted, with any perceived morals secondary to the silliness of the Fool’s adventures.

Still from The Fool and the Flying Ship

There’s a case to be made, though, that Williams is simply following the lead of the wild illustrations that visualize the tale. Not a true animation, the movie consists of still images of Henrik Drescher’s artwork, similar to the snapshots of book pages found on “Reading Rainbow.” Drescher’s drawings are often ugly, sometimes even deranged, but filled with such joyful anarchic spirit that director Craig Rogers doesn’t need to do much more than add a little Ken Burns-effect here and there. The illustrations, set to Williams’ energetic performance, do the lion’s Continue reading THEY CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE FOOL AND THE FLYING SHIP (1991) / MOUSE SOUP (1993) →

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: BOXING HELENA (1993)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY: (credited as Jennifer Chambers Lynch)

FEATURING: Julian Sands, , Bill Paxton, Kurtwood Smith, , Betsy Clark

PLOT: Unable to cope with his recent breakup with the temperamental Helena, surgeon Nick Cavanaugh finds himself caring for her at his house after a car accident.

Still from Boxing Helena (1993)

COMMENTS: I honestly don’t recall which was the bigger source of discussion when Boxing Helena hit theaters. Was it David Lynch’s daughter helming her first feature? Or was it the prospect of so much sexiness revolving around “Twin Peaks” bad girl Fenn? Some of it was probably the titillatingly taboo premise of a man so infatuated with a woman that he hacks off all her limbs and puts her in a box. (Spoiler: there is exactly one box in this movie, and it does not contain Helena.) But the bulk of the attention circled around the fact that Kim Basinger had to pony up nearly $4 million as recompense for breaking her contract to appear in the title role (and that was after Madonna had rejected it outright). Many of the negative contemporary reviews congratulated Basinger on getting the better end of the deal—and with 30 years distance, watching the film with clearer eyes, we discover that those critics were absolutely right.

We learn at the outset that Nick has been emotionally scarred from his youth, with a slutty mom who rejected him and left him hungry for love. So maybe it’s easy to understand what he sees in Helena: the apathy, the dismissiveness, the belittling condescension… who could turn that down? What’s not at all clear is what she ever saw in him. Within two minutes of arriving at Nick’s party, she’s stripped down to her negligee and cavorting in the fountain. It’s hard to argue that she leaves anything on the table.

One of our most iconic weird actors, Julian Sands, is either terribly miscast or horribly directed. This beautiful, suave man flounces about like an emasculated mockery of masculinity, whining and pining for a lost love that it’s not clear he ever had. But as pathetic as he makes Nick, Lynch goes to great pains to make him more so, with mournful closeups as he jogs and his puppy-dog fawning over her. Later, when Helena mocks his poor bedroom skills, his defensive retort is, “If you were a real woman, you’d lie to me about our sex.” It’s hard to know if Sands is in on the joke or just fully committed to Nick’s painful lack of self-awareness, but his despairing cry of “she’s leaving?” actually left me in hysterical laughter.

Fenn, meanwhile, has almost nothing to do. She begins the film peevish; the loss of her legs makes her angry, the loss of her arms moreso. Her shift to a needier, more empathetic character is motivated not by any change in her but rather as a means of bringing about a change in Nick, an especially odd choice given that a massive plot twist essentially undoes all of the “learning” we’ve witnessed. So this movie about handicapping and torturing a beautiful woman in order to satisfy a broken male ego can’t even commit to its own questionable choices.

Once you establish that the whole thing is an elaborate melodrama with no real point, you can start to embrace it as unintentional comedy, with ridiculous situations, thudding dialogue, and overheated acting. This is best exemplified by the amazingly entertaining Bill Paxton, who shows up as Helena’s occasional boytoy in a Nigel Tufnel hairdo, mesh T-shirt, and leather pants, as cocksure as a 12-year-old trying to buy liquor. The movie may believe in him (when he busts out a Benjamin in payment for information, it cracks on the soundtrack with a snap), but there’s no reason we should. Bragging about his manhood one moment, hiding in the bushes like a Peeping Tom the next, he’s always absurd. The moment late in the third act when he sees what has become of Helena is a masterful double-take, a magnificent piece of comic idiocy.

Boxing Helena could have used a lot more of that, because it is resolutely dumb but lacks the wisdom to recognize it. Young Ms. Lynch seems to think she’s created something bold and erotic and profound. That is an impulse that should be cut off.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“I am probably prevented by some unwritten law from divulging the end of Boxing Helena. I can only say that, instead of adding an extra twist to this bizarre tale, it deprives it of what little point it had.”–Quentin Crisp, Christopher Street (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Motyka. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)