The documentary Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song draws a skillful parallel between the destiny of this song and the trajectory of the Montreal poet.
Posted yesterday at 8:30 a.m.
Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine’s film, which premiered last month at the Tribeca Film Festival, looks back on Leonard Cohen’s youth and beginnings and retraces the major stages of his career: his first performance on stage with Judy Collins, his studio recordings and tours. It is also about its low point in the 1980s and its successive rebirths: at the turn of the 1990s first, then at the beginning of the 2000s.
These are, for the most part, things that we know if we are a little interested in the career of the artist. What matters here is the way: at the heart of this documentary, there is Leonard Cohen, a serious and tongue-in-cheek man, driven by a spiritual quest and celebrated creator who remains humble before the mysteries of the ‘inspiration.
These different faces of the artist are skillfully explored through his song. Hallelujah, which he wrote over several years, obscuring entire notebooks before fixing a version on disc. It is both the symbol of his rigor in writing, of his being torn between spiritual elevation, carnal desires and amorous quest. And that of a failure: the disc Various Positions (1984), on which she appeared, was rejected by Columbia and Hallelujah went unnoticed when it came out.
But she was going to come back to life.
Taken on stage by Bob Dylan at the end of the 1980s, it then appeared in a “secular” version reworked by John Cale. The former Velvet Underground had asked Cohen to send him the lyrics and dipped into the fifteen verses received by fax. The rest, as they say, is history: Jeff Buckley in turn recorded this version and gave it the impetus to become the grandiose emblem of Cohen’s work and the universality of his subject. .
Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine, who were inspired by a book by Alan Light called The Holy and the Broken, handle with sensitivity the rich material they have in hand. Their film is nourished by interviews with a number of relatives and collaborators of Cohen, offers rich archive images (many interviews with the artist) and touching extracts from concerts. The film is accompanied by the publication of a new compilation capped with the same title which opens with a gripping interpretation ofHallelujah by Leonard Cohen at the Glastonbury Festival in 2008.
Indoors
Presented in the original version in English and with French subtitles.
Documentary
Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song (Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a journey, a hymn)
Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine
With Leonard Cohen, John Lissauer, Sharon Robinson, Judy Collins and Larry Ratso Sloman
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