»… Play-rew-forward-stop …« audio-video music serie 3.2
The audio-video music series will continue at the Palazzo Cini at San
Vio from October to December, when it will come to a close. The
remaining two short series, entitled after the forward and stop
buttons on video players, are intended to convey a powerful impression
of the plurality of passions, of the “forward” and “stop” in artistic
research, which may be represented by Virgil’s sprawling beech tree (sub tegmine fagi): an uncontrollable manifestation of the hypertrophy of the sense organs trained on beauty.
Venice, Palazzo Cini at San Vio
10 October 2009, 5.00pm
Second session: Glenn Gould Videogame – Hereafter
A
video by Bruno Monsaingeon in search of a self-portrait of Glenn Gould from the
total audio-video documents
Since
the death of the great Canadian pianist in 1982, various attempts have been
made at producing a resurrection effect of his genius (he, moreover, was
greatly committed to promoting the creative power of means of reproduction) and
to re-present his essentially artistic biography, as mediated by media.
One
of the more interesting of these works is the creation of a video game
requiring a bold approach and designed to gradually uncover the personality of
the pianist.
There
have been any number of Gould documentaries, but always incomplete, detached or
lacking in effective phenomenologies or epiphanies, since everything concerning
Gould was actually consigned by Gould himself to documentation, archiving and
audio-visual translation, building a mass of evidence that could be used to
document quantitatively and temporally not one, two or three but umpteen
reproduced whole lives from his eccentric existence.
A
French violinist, filmmaker, and fraternal friend of Gould, Bruno Monsaingeon,
followed each step in the musician’s life for over thirty years, documenting,
filming, photographing, recording, elaborating, etc.
When
it came to making the total reconstruction game, the violinist-filmmaker felt
almost overwhelmed by the simultaneous timings of the momentary biographical
frames and forms, all equally significant.
But
let’s allow Monsaingeon himself to introduce the vision of the result obtained:
“I had to uproot the
idea of the work from the documentary framework in which he traditionally is
and flourishes. I therefore imagined a polyphonic structure containing fiction
and the document-item which relies on two or three basic ideas.
First: elaborate a supposedly
self-portrait narrative strategy to give form not so much to documented facts
as intangible thoughts.
Second: the pressure of
gargantuan correspondence between myself and people all around the world for
thirty years. In this second enormous notepad are people of very different
generations, of various languages and with different or even opposed
sensibilities.
From these thousands of
possible interventions I chose five interlocutors whom I thought capable of
establishing a dialogue with Glenn’s hereafter. I used as a filter Gould’s idea
of having abstract remote interlocutors (the audience), separated by time and
space, who were not menial listeners summoned as if in concerts to passively
attend an artistic banquet.
Hence
the polyphonic structure, guaranteed by the twenty-five years separating these
filmed audiences today from Gould’s death.
Then
I went through the miles of footage on Gould at work.
Similarly,
I sifted through thousands of hours of sound documents (with no video).
Next
I tried to introduce the character of Gould’s automobile, the celebrated black
Lincoln Continental he used to call Long Fellow. I interpreted it as Gould’s
only go-between with the real world, veiled by the famous smoked glass windows.
Then
I steeped the film in music as a mimetic demonstration of how Glenn’s life was
totally imbued with music… For this I insisted on never previously heard or
unknown performances.”
