{"id":18516,"date":"2022-07-06T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-07-06T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=18516"},"modified":"2024-03-02T21:12:35","modified_gmt":"2024-03-03T05:12:35","slug":"leonard-cohen-and-the-documentary-lens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/leonard-cohen-and-the-documentary-lens\/","title":{"rendered":"Leonard Cohen and the Documentary Lens"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

If anyone was destined to become a songwriter\u2019s songwriter, that person was Leonard Cohen. He wrote hymn-like songs about sex and death, sung in a baritone that fans would describe as profound and detractors would dismiss as monotonous; his peers and the artists who cited him as an influence brought his words to a wider audience through their covers of his work. Through Jeff Buckley\u2019s spare, ethereal cover of \u201cHallelujah\u201d, interest in Cohen\u2019s music reached a peak in the 2000s. Buckley and producer Andy Wallace\u2019s arrangement of the song became a popular needle drop in films and TV shows, and artists like John Cale and Rufus Wainwright\u2014as well as a few American Idol <\/em>contestants\u2014brought this new version of \u201cHallelujah\u201d to a wider audience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the documentary Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song, <\/em>filmmakers Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller explore the history of Cohen\u2019s signature song. Audiences who come to the film with a love of the song \u201cHallelujah\u201d but no real knowledge of Cohen\u2019s life or career might be interested in learning more about the influence of his music on singer\/songwriters in the 1960s and beyond. Because Cohen\u2019s musical and literary career dovetailed with a series of innovations in documentary filmmaking, his body of work and his evolution as a musician and writer has been well represented in nonfiction film.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cohen is closely associated with the city of Montreal, where he was born and came of age. It seems right that his first documentary, Ladies and Gentlemen\u2026 Mr. Leonard Cohen<\/em>, was a product of the National Film Board of Canada\u2019s Direct Cinema movement. Directors Donald Britten and Don Owen followed Cohen on a series of readings and appearances in Montreal to support Beautiful Losers<\/em>, his first novel. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

To contemporary audiences, Ladies and Gentlemen <\/em>looks like a self-aware version of the promotional packages you see on TV shows like CBS Sunday Morning<\/em>. Britten and Owen build the making of the film into the film itself by showing cameras and sound equipment in a few shots and editing the NFB\u2019s countdown leader into a final sequence where Cohen views a rough cut of the documentary. The writer also addresses members of the film crew and makes jokes and observations about things they\u2019ve shot or events they\u2019ve seen, sometimes before these events are presented in the film. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ladies and Gentlemen <\/em>contradicts some of the received knowledge later audiences would have about Cohen. The intensity of his poetry and song lyrics, combined with his retreat into a Zen Buddhist monastery in the mid-1990s, gave him the aura of a dour prophet disenchanted with the modern world. The opening scene of Ladies and Gentlemen<\/em>\u2014in which Cohen performs an extemporaneous-seeming standup act about his ill-fated visit to a friend in a mental institution\u2014shows that he could have evolved from a poet and novelist to a quick-witted comedian instead of a singer\/songwriter. While he cultivated an image as a dapper rogue in his final years, his rugged good looks and edgy preppy wardrobe evoke the dashing young men who graced every sad girl\u2019s Tumblr dashboard in the 2010s. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many music fans who can appreciate Cohen\u2019s songs have cited his deep, vibrato-heavy bass-baritone as a deterrent. I\u2019m Your Man<\/em>, Lian Lunson\u2019s 2006 documentary about the Australian tribute concert Came So Far for Beauty, gives those listeners what they want, with a Pitchfork-approved cast of mid-2000s indie singers performing Cohen\u2019s most beloved songs alongside a cast of his contemporaries and their offspring. Musically, the event sounds like a single-artist tribute album that a respectable indie label would release in the 1990s, a comparison that makes sense when music director Hal Willner\u2014who produced many of those compilations\u2014appears on-camera as an interview subject.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On a visual level, the three-camera setup and nondescript stage set suggests the kind of concert you\u2019d see on PBS during pledge week. A few of the more dramatic performers attempt visually compelling performances, as with the high-stepping version of \u201cI\u2019m Your Man\u201d by Nick Cave that opens the film, but many of the younger performers have a fidgety, deer-in-the-headlights quality that gets distracting. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lunson interspersed the concert footage with interviews with the participants and with Cohen himself. The interview was shot a year before the embezzlement that forced Cohen back on tour and finds the singer in a relaxed, jovial mood, telling amusing stories from his career and cracking a sly smile from under the wide brim of his trademark fedora. While some of the other interview subjects follow Cohen\u2019s bemused, self-aware lead\u2014as with Rufus Wainwright\u2019s tale of meeting his friend Lorca Cohen\u2019s dad for the first time\u2014others attempt to evoke the poet\u2019s somber literary and musical persona with varying degrees of success. (Those with a low tolerance for the lubricious oratory style of Bono from U2 should have their finger on the fast-forward button.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The role of the muse played a huge role in Cohen\u2019s creative output; two of his best-known songs were about women who played a significant role in his life, and his use of female vocalists and songwriting collaborators was a key component of his work. The documentary Marianne & Leonard <\/em>looks at his career through the prism of his relationship with Marianne Ihlen, a woman he met on the Greek island of Hydra who inspired some of his most well-known songs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

After opening with Ihlen and Cohen\u2019s deaths, which happened a few months apart from one another, director Nick Broomfield opens the story in the mid-1960s, when Cohen was a celebrated poet but had yet to pick up a guitar. Ihlen, a divorcee with a young son, welcomed the writer into her home and encouraged him to write and eventually to make music. Ihlen\u2019s need for a relatively stable life conflicted with Cohen\u2019s more freewheeling lifestyle (and his love of women), but they remained in contact throughout their lives. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marianne and Leonard <\/em>has a less sensationalistic approach to its subject matter than many of Broomfield\u2019s previous documentaries. He interviews sources whose names would be unfamiliar to all but the most devoted Cohen fan, and editor Marc Hoeferlin stays with some of the interviews instead of rapidly cutting away to stills or archival footage that would illustrate the point they were making. His use of home movie footage shot when Cohen was living in Hydra gives the film a pleasantly intimate feel, which is supported by Broomfield\u2019s voiceover recollections of the time he spent with Ihlen when he was a young man.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The film is engaging and at times poignant\u2014as in the scenes in the film that depict Ihlen\u2019s son\u2019s fate\u2014but watching it in the post-MeToo era can feel a little uncomfortable. The split between Cohen\u2019s globe-trotting, womanizing lifestyle and Ihlen\u2019s modest, domestic existence falls a little too neatly along gendered lines. While singer\/songwriter Julie Felix speaks to Ihlen\u2019s encouragement of her musical career, her statements that Cohen \u201cloved women\u201d and hoped for a matriarchal leadership during his lifetime seems a bit doth-protest-too-much, especially in the context of Cohen\u2019s anti-choice lyrics for \u201cThe Future\u201d. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Leonard Cohen left an influential literary and musical legacy, which can be intimidating for newcomers who are interested in his work. These documentaries put Cohen\u2019s work in context and allow listeners to hear his music and poetry in conversation with their eras. Perhaps Goldfine and Geller\u2019s Hallelujah <\/em>will allow even the most seasoned Cohen devotee to hear his most beloved song in a new light. \"\"\/<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song” is in theaters now.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With “Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song” in theaters, we look at a few of the previous documentary portraits of the iconic singer\/songwriter. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":607,"featured_media":18518,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1399],"tags":[1422,34],"class_list":["post-18516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-looking-back","tag-looking-back","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/607"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18516"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18516\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21939,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18516\/revisions\/21939"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}