"Glenn Gould Hereafter", Director Bruno Monsaingeon presents his new film

You are currently finishing your new film on Glenn Gould, still Gould is not exactly an artist on whom filmed documents are scarce…

Of course. I had my share of hesitations before starting this project. It’s been seven years since Ideale Audience and myself have been working on it. Usually, I never do commissioned work but I was asked if I would accept to do something big on Gould. I hesitated a great deal before taking it up, even mentioning in my initial project that I needed a specifically strong purpose to start. Something really original had to be made, not just another documentary on Gould. Therefore I listed a number of conditions which in fact make up the storyline itself. Since Gould’s death, a synthesis has been made. For my part, I wrote 4 books and made a 23-episode television series, in which I’ve already restructured the whole of Glenn’s audiovisual legacy. So what was left to do? I had absolutely no interest in telling Gould’s story in a classic way, with a commentary. I therefore imagined this polyphonic structure which relies on three ideas: The first is that it is Gould himself that tells his story : biographical elements but also some of the major themes from his thought. The second one is the fact that for thirty years, I have been receiving a huge, gargantuan, correspondence from around the world, from all kinds of people, every nationality, every language, every social level. This correspondence gives a clear idea of Gould’s universality and the very nature of the impact that he had, which is different than any other interpreter ever had. No other artist had such an impact on people’s lives.

Rightly so, the film will introduce viewers to some amazing people whose life was totally impregnated with Gould. Can you tell us a little about them ?

First, I had to go back to that correspondence, all these letters I had received. Then I selected some possible characters. I met them and thought of a very diverse cast, geographically speaking: Europe, Russia, Japan. Men and women. We tried to give a realistic sample of the world’s population although I didn’t want to include too many people. The idea was to pick up characters who weren’t just basic fans. Some people are only, well, fanatical... I needed people who were actually making something out of this. The main examples being this German guy whose passion for Gould is such that he wanted to get in contact with him and created a method to do so. It’s something that is part of his daily life, for his own enjoyment. There is also this Russian woman whose life was almost saved by Gould. Having suffered two cerebral strokes, she heard Gould by coincidence and it was like a revelation to her. Since then, she has recovered although she was paralysed. Now she runs a sort of “ Gouldian” propaganda office and spreads the gospel around Moscow, where she lives.

What really stands as striking when one talks about Gould is the choice of words, which is more appropriate to people like rock stars than to classical music performers...

Absolutely. It’s because he reached a similar level of fame plus the fact that he transformed many lives. He was a kind of guru, someone whose life affected people. It is very peculiar though because it usually doesn’t work like this for music performers. If Gould reaches out to a much wider audience than the classical music’s one, it is because he really thought the musical phenomenon over, and had a very deep reflexion about how to communicate it. Of course, he’s one of History’s greatest pianists, no need to repeat that point. The most important thing was to know what was going on around him twenty five years after his death. To give people who went through the Gould experience the feeling that some kind of ghost was returning to speak with them. Which brings me to the third main idea of the film, being of course the archival footage, using it in a different perspective from other documentaries.

A very basic question, yet one that will be of interest to all those awaiting this new film: Will it feature some yet unreleased footage ?

It was the problem that I raised in my first screenplay... Of course, I found stuff that was previously unknown, such as Gould’s own voice to begin with, which hardly anyone knows. I also strongly relied on something that will be a first for most of the viewers: It happens that when we shot our last films together, the Bach films, specially the Goldbergs, I kept all the rushes. I wanted to use them for the occasion so that we end up seeing Gould literally in a sort of afterlife, beyond the grave: We take a shot together and right after, he comments this very shot. That will allow one to feel and watch Glenn’s work from a very lively perspective. These are just rushes : at the very moment we stop shooting, the camera doesn’t keep the same focus but one could still see Glenn within the frame and the unstability of the camera makes for an incredible feeling. For people who know, the Goldbergs as they were edited and post produced, seeing Gould reacting to his own work is truly something gripping.

It was important for me to really put each archive element in a structure that never gives the feeling of superficiality and to avoid falling into a talk/music/talk/music scheme. I wanted a wider range of shots. I also wanted to show “ Gouldian” places, for example the Great Canadian North. When shooting the film we rented the same car that Glenn owned and drove to places where he used to go for writing or meditating.

If Gould was alive today, he would be fascinated by internet, downloading and all those new technologies that allow unlimited access to music...

He clearly opened those perspectives. He not only discussed private use of music but also how listeners should be allowed to manipulate a finished product. He was well ahead of his time. His hope was to give listeners something that they could act upon, upon which they could express their own vision. Gould’s project was to become himself an object of interpretation. He hoped for example, that with new manipulations, one could change or alter a recording’s tempo while respecting its original pitch. He hoped that one day the participating listener as he called him would, according to his moods, be able to slow the tempo and modify a whole lot of parameters. That was his great idea: The listener wasn’t some sort of slave seating passively in the back at the banquet of the Arts. For Glenn, composers, interpreters AND listeners were to form a whole. In this sense, his thought mainly consists in a prophecy, one that is coming true now.

Which takes us back to the film’s title : Glenn Gould Hereafter... :

There is an extraordinary rich way of thinking within Gould that is still stimulating today and constitutes a form of prophecy . The transcendental dimension is obvious... He had a thought on History, on rejecting modernity. One can almost feel within him that there is a thought that goes well beyond sonic reproduction, a more mystical dimension of the musical object. This way of thinking isn’t exhausted yet, it’s inexhaustible. Or at least it will remain valid for a very long time.

The second piece of news about you is the recent release of your film on Yehudi Menuhin The Violin Of The Century in the Classic Archive DVD collection. Can you put the film back into perspective for those who don’t know it yet ?

It’s without a doubt one of my most personal films. I had an extraordinary strong relation with Menuhin, whom I consider to be the greatest violinist of the 20th century doubled with, yet again, a penomenal human dimension. I wanted that to be part of the film but without focussing too much on it. It wasn’t my first with him , so The Violin... is nourished with a lot of archival footage filmed with him. In the last twenty years, as his performing technique slowly waned, the image of Menuhin as a great humanist got around. He was made some kind of humanist in the silly sense of the word and that is something that I wanted to leave aside from the very start: This film is about Menuhin, the great violinist of the 20th century. It was an occasion for me to dig into footage that was supposedly lost. It was wonderful to find pictures of a Menuhin that are part of the collective subconscience. Because Menuhin created the musical sensibility of an era. It went that far. His musical impact is enormous: Europe, America and Russia’s musical sensiblity were mainly shaped by his Art. The whole plan was to bring back this sensibility as well as the artist himself at the same time. And Menuhin’s magic worked around one basic idea: He was one of the busiest musicians around, playing up to 150 concerts a year, in demand everywhere. So we had to cut through all this. We went to his house in Greece where he took holidays, dedicating himself entirely to the shooting of the film. It was fabulous. He was there, totally concentrated on the film. Somedays, he even proposed me to start shooting at five in the morning. He was an actor as well as an integral part of the shooting process. I think it is the reason why the film is still deeply moving, and so popular. We went way beyond the image of him being this adorable character, of great kindness. I simply tried to show the light of the real Menuhin in the sense that there is nothing fashionable left. I thought of the film as the “Menuhian” monument: A door is opened on an unknown character who happened to be the century’s most popular musician.

As a director, what are your views on the DVD format ?

DVD is a miraculous object, it really is the outcome of what we expected. The fact that today, TV broadcasters impose several versions of a single film in terms of duration often results in painful constraints. But now we work with the knowledge that DVD will allow the existence of a version of the film as it was meant to be and that is fantastic. With DVD collections like Classic Archive, music lovers get the opportunity to access fabulously rich archival sources, which appears to me as one of the prime vocations for DVD. It is important that those films don’t fall into oblivion. But in the same way that we have to bring back to life archives from the past, it is essential to build now archives for the future and DVD is allowing this to happen. The danger being of course… overprofusion.

In parallel with making my documentaries on living musicians, I have always shot music-only sequences ready to be proposed on DVD. So one can have a film as well as the complete musical elements.

What are your projects in that perspective ?

I must admit that lately, I’ve been strongly tempted to quit doing what I do and retire. That’s because, for numerous reasons, it is getting more and more difficult to start a film. Still, I do have some strong desires. I’d like to do something with Piotr Anderszewski again , he’s a musician of prodigious intelligence. Valery Sokolov, with whom I recently shot Natural-born Fiddler/ (to be released in September 2006 on DVD), is without a doubt the violonist of the 21st century - so I’d really like to continue working with him but on a very long term basis, to constitute some sort of magnum opus. The project that is the dearest to me at the moment is centered on Julia Varady (the wife of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, she currently gives singing lesson in Germany).

Glenn Gould Hereafter : First available broadcast bates :

February 19 2006 (8pm) : ARTV (French Canada)