By Christine Westwood
Inspired by the book The Holy Of The Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley & The Unlikely Ascent Of Hallelujah by Alan Light, a new documentary about Leonard Cohen is brought to the screen. Approved for production by Cohen just before his 80th birthday in 2014, the film had access to the Cohen Trust archives, including his personal notebooks, journals and photographs, performance footage, and rare audio recordings and interviews.
Apart from Light’s book, documentary makers Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfire (Galapagos Affair, Ballet Russe) were inspired by a more personal event. “We went to see him in concert in Oakland, California in 2009,” Goldfire told Cinema Daily. “Friends took us. They said, ‘Leonard’s coming to town. If you’ve never been to a Leonard Cohen concert, you can’t miss this. We’re buying you tickets.”
The director describes it as being like a religious experience. Alan Light’s book stood out for its potential as a story, a tale of rejection and eventual unprecedented success, while the song itself is an unrivalled classic. “The song has all sorts of spiritual hooks in it…it’s about searching, contradiction, carnal, holy and broken, all at once,” says Alan Light. As for its survival, in 1983 Columbia Records ditched the album that “Hallelujah” appeared on. Many covers were recorded over the next decades but Cohen’s version didn’t register on the Billboard charts until his death in 2016 at 82.
In the absence of fresh interviews with Cohen himself, the documentary threads a narrative through talking head interviews with some of those closest to the legendary singer. Judy Collins, who got him on stage for his performance debut in 1967, is one commentator. Larry “Ratso” Sloman, a music journalist who had a lifetime connection, including original taped interviews, is another. Longtime romantic partner and photographer, the striking Dominique Issermann, a creator in her own right who shot some of the iconic Cohen portraits, is also interviewed. Speaking most specifically to “Hallelujah” are producer-musician John Lissauer, with Cohen’s longtime rabbi, Mordecai Finley, adding additional spiritual context.
The wealth of interviews works to a point in Geller and Goldfire’s determination to not create another bio narrative, but they also make the film feel over long and padded. Visually, they make great use of images like Ratso’s old audio tapes and the mass of Cohen’s notebooks of all types and sizes that create a great visual narrative in themselves, especially the pages animated to fade in and out of the seven years’ iterations of “Hallelujah” as Cohen obsessively worked and reworked it. And in the end, it’s Cohen’s face photographed over the decades that you’re left with, a life lived and how that life is revealed through the eyes to the camera, always in the suit and hat, dapper gent and Everyman in one.
The “Hallelujah” story does work as a fascinating insight into a committed creative and spiritual journey. Cohen wrote ceaselessly, writing a reported 180 verses alone for “Hallelujah” during the writing process. A privileged Jewish boy concerned with human suffering, Cohen said his goal was to become an Elder. His grandfather was a rabbi and when Cohen was 40 he could begin studies of the Kabbalah.
In later years, he became a monk at Mount Baldry Zen Buddhist monastery. Then in his 70s, religion and the creative journey fused to take on a rebirth where Cohen toured for five years and recorded until his death. The story is that his agent stole his money, forcing him back out on the road, but Cohen insists that was only part of the motive. He needed to express his creative muse again, give it out to the public from the personally happier and more serene place he had arrived at, and that is evident in the film’s concert footage. “At the foothills of old age,” he said, “there’s an urgency to complete one’s work.”
Meanwhile the film follows the “Hallelujah” journey from Jeff Beck’s recording to John Cale’s stripped back rendering and Rufus Wainwright’s commercial offering that was picked up for the animated film Shrek (though it’s Cale’s voice in the screen version). There’s an overworked section in the documentary showing us the many iterations “Hallelujah” went through. Dylan’s version, with his signature acid twist, is great, as are Beck, Cale and Wainwright and the spectacular k d lang performing at Cohen’s memorial, but then there’s a LOT of reality shows, buskers and a raft of cover artists. After a few frames, we get the point.
A musical Messiah for many, for others it’s music to slit your wrists by. It’s a nice thread in the film to see that Cohen was funny with warm ironic humour in interviews and, as befits his original craft as poet and novelist, nice quotable phrases. “If I knew where a song came from, I’d go there more often,” Cohen says in the film. And to a fan who calls out from the audience “ I love your voice, Leonard,” the singer smiles in response: “You’re the only one who does.”
Geller offers a rich insight to Cinema Daily into the roots of Cohen’s art. “In the Jewish tradition, there’s the rabbi, who is a teacher – not a priest, a rabbi – who is reading the liturgy; and then there is a cantor, a singer, who is singing these beautiful psalms and other songs. So right away, you’ve got this intersection of liturgy and music.”
“Hallelujah” was the apex of this, fusing sacred and profane, searching and suffering, with the word itself appearing in many religions. In spite of a few missing marks, the directors have added another offering to Cohen’s documented life, aided by the Cohen Trust archives and coproduction by prolific music documentarian Morgan Neville. While seeing all the watered down pop renderings may be a bit cringe worthy, Ratso says that he believes Cohen would have been “tickled pink that every performer and his dog were playing it.”
Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song is released in cinemas on July 14.
