In Thursday’s (12/3) Montreal Gazette, Canwest reporter Jay Stone writes, “Michele Hozer is sitting in her film-editing offices in downtown Toronto, surrounded by boxes filled with papers and CDs, and bookshelves jammed with biographies and magazines. She’s up to her knees in Glenn Gould. For months, she researched Gould and listened to his classic recording of the Goldberg Variations, as well as his versions of Brahms, Sibelius and Beethoven, over and over.” Hozer’s new film is Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould, “a documentary she directed with Peter Raymont that looks at the human side of Gould: his eccentricities, the genius of his technique, but also his playful moments and, in what might be a surprise to some people, his romances. There are scenes of Gould at the piano, but we also see home movies of him on holidays in the Bahamas, pretending to direct a film starring a young woman he has met at a bar, or serenading an elephant at the zoo. And we meet Cornelia Foss, the wife of pianist Lukas Foss, who left her husband and moved in with Gould for a while. … Genius Within allows Gould to speak—there’s no narration—as part of the attempt to get inside the public persona.”
Posted December 3, 2009
