Leonard Cohen documentary focuses on that inescapable song
Making a feature length documentary about a single song is a risky gambit. Even the most beloved tune is likely to wear out its welcome after the first hour. But Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” inhabits its own rarified realm with a pedigree that stretches credulity.
More than a song, “Hallelujah” has become an international hymn that seems endlessly pliable. Carnal and sanctified, endlessly reworked and rearranged, it provides a supremely dramatic vehicle for divergent impulses.
Directed by the veteran San Francisco documentary team of Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine, “Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song” details the song’s unlikely rise from obscurity to ubiquity, while tracing the life and career of Cohen (1934-2016), who grew up in an eminent family at the center of Montreal’s tightknit Ashkenazi Jewish community.
Opening July 8 at San Rafael’s Smith Rafael Film Center, Berkeley’s Elmwood Theatre and San Francisco’s Roxie Theater and Opera Plaza Cinemas (and spreading around the region in the following weeks), the film is a fascinating account of how “Hallelujah” carved out such a significant place in the Western world’s musical psyche. (Check the theaters’ website for schedule of public Q&As with Geller and Goldfine.)
While the film runs almost two hours, it moves at a brisk pace with a braided narrative that shows how the song came to occupy a singular place in Cohen’s life and oeuvre. Rather than a fixed entity, “Hallelujah” was an evolving project that he painstakingly reworked, expanded and edited. Journalist Larry “Ratso” Sloman, who interviewed Cohen numerous times over three decades and provides incisive commentary throughout the documentary, estimates that Cohen wrote up to 180 versus for “Hallelujah.”
Geller and Goldfine have a lot of experience telling intricate tales. Their excellent work includes 2005’s “Ballet Russes” and 2013’s “The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden.” They’ve tackled something quite different with “Hallelujah,” a song that has been well-covered in print. They worked closely with Alan Light, who wrote 2013’s “The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Ascent of ‘Hallelujah,’” though the song’s role in Cohen’s late career resurgence was also well covered in Liel Leibovitz’s 2014 book “A Broken Hallelujah: Rock and Roll, Redemption, and the Life of Leonard Cohen.”
The only other film in recent decades to focus so closely on a particular song was Joel Katz’s 2002 documentary “Strange Fruit,” about the anti-lynching anthem made famous by Billie Holiday. That’s rich historical territory, as it was written by a member of the American Communist Party, Abel Meeropol, who two decades later with his wife adopted the two boys orphaned by the execution of atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Lee Daniels’ 2021 melodrama about the FBI persecuting the jazz legend because she wouldn’t drop the song from her performances, “The United States vs. Billie Holiday,” has no basis in fact.
But even Hollywood mythmaking at its most freewheeling couldn’t come up with a more convoluted path for a song to become a standard.
Cohen had already labored over “Hallelujah” for years when he first recorded it with a spare, gospel-inflected John Lissauer arrangement on the 1984 album “Various Positions.” But Cohen’s relationship with Columbia Records quickly cratered as his longtime label promptly buried the album, refusing to release it in the U.S. (despite containing several other enduring songs, including “Dance Me to the End of Time,” “Night Comes On,” and “If It Be Your Will”).
Bob Dylan, a songwriter well-acquainted with Biblical allusions, was the first to champion “Hallelujah,” performing it often in the mid-’80s. And when the 1991 tribute album “I’m Your Fan” concluded with a mesmerizing solo version by John Cale, “Hallelujah” started gaining momentum.
The film covers several more key developments, including the counter-intuitive masterstroke that introduced the song to the grade school set in the 2001 DreamWorks Animation hit “Shrek.”
Goldfine and Geller don’t belabor the point, but early in the film Sloman describes himself as “patient zero” for the “virus” that “Hallelujah” would become. In a recent video call with the filmmakers, Goldfine said that was a bread crumb for “people who are cynical about it” so that viewers didn’t feel locked into a reverent point of view. Cohen seemed to agree. As it becomes a staple in clubs and concert halls, he opines in an interview “people ought to stop singing it for a little while.”
The cynicism fully blossoms toward the end of the film as a montage featuring almost a dozen clips from TV talent shows capture spotlight-seeking singers milking poor “Hallelujah” for every drop of pseudo profundity. It’s a sequence that “showed how the circus developed,” Geller said. But several quieter clips follow, including Yolanda Adams’ rendition at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool during the national COVID-19 memorial in January 2021.
“You can try all you want to abuse this song,” Geller said. “It won’t matter. If someone wants to take it for what it really is, it can be fresh and wonderful.” And transcendent. That’s never more so than on Cohen’s final tour, as another artful sequence weaves together the artist in his element, looking dapper and priestly in his trademark black suit. Hallelujah.
Contact Andrew Gilbert at [email protected].
MEET THE FILMMAKERS
“Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song” opens July 8 at several Bay Area theaters, and San Francisco filmmakers Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine will appear at several screening Q&As this weekend. Here’s a look:
Opera Plaza Cinemas, San Francisco: 7 p.m. July 7 and 4:30 p.m. July 10; details here.
Rialto Cinemas Elmwood, Berkeley: 4 p.m. July 9; details here.
Smith Rafael Film Center, San Rafael: 7 p.m. July 9; details here.
Roxie Theater, San Francisco: 7 p.m. July 8 and 10; details here.
Making a feature length documentary about a single song is a risky gambit. Even the most beloved tune is likely to wear out its welcome after the first hour. But Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” inhabits its own rarified realm with a pedigree that stretches credulity.
More than a song, “Hallelujah” has become an international hymn that seems endlessly pliable. Carnal and sanctified, endlessly reworked and rearranged, it provides a supremely dramatic vehicle for divergent impulses.
Directed by the veteran San Francisco documentary team of Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine, “Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song” details the song’s unlikely rise from obscurity to ubiquity, while tracing the life and career of Cohen (1934-2016), who grew up in an eminent family at the center of Montreal’s tightknit Ashkenazi Jewish community.
Opening July 8 at San Rafael’s Smith Rafael Film Center, Berkeley’s Elmwood Theatre and San Francisco’s Roxie Theater and Opera Plaza Cinemas (and spreading around the region in the following weeks), the film is a fascinating account of how “Hallelujah” carved out such a significant place in the Western world’s musical psyche. (Check the theaters’ website for schedule of public Q&As with Geller and Goldfine.)
While the film runs almost two hours, it moves at a brisk pace with a braided narrative that shows how the song came to occupy a singular place in Cohen’s life and oeuvre. Rather than a fixed entity, “Hallelujah” was an evolving project that he painstakingly reworked, expanded and edited. Journalist Larry “Ratso” Sloman, who interviewed Cohen numerous times over three decades and provides incisive commentary throughout the documentary, estimates that Cohen wrote up to 180 versus for “Hallelujah.”
Geller and Goldfine have a lot of experience telling intricate tales. Their excellent work includes 2005’s “Ballet Russes” and 2013’s “The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden.” They’ve tackled something quite different with “Hallelujah,” a song that has been well-covered in print. They worked closely with Alan Light, who wrote 2013’s “The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Ascent of ‘Hallelujah,’” though the song’s role in Cohen’s late career resurgence was also well covered in Liel Leibovitz’s 2014 book “A Broken Hallelujah: Rock and Roll, Redemption, and the Life of Leonard Cohen.”
The only other film in recent decades to focus so closely on a particular song was Joel Katz’s 2002 documentary “Strange Fruit,” about the anti-lynching anthem made famous by Billie Holiday. That’s rich historical territory, as it was written by a member of the American Communist Party, Abel Meeropol, who two decades later with his wife adopted the two boys orphaned by the execution of atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Lee Daniels’ 2021 melodrama about the FBI persecuting the jazz legend because she wouldn’t drop the song from her performances, “The United States vs. Billie Holiday,” has no basis in fact.
But even Hollywood mythmaking at its most freewheeling couldn’t come up with a more convoluted path for a song to become a standard.
Cohen had already labored over “Hallelujah” for years when he first recorded it with a spare, gospel-inflected John Lissauer arrangement on the 1984 album “Various Positions.” But Cohen’s relationship with Columbia Records quickly cratered as his longtime label promptly buried the album, refusing to release it in the U.S. (despite containing several other enduring songs, including “Dance Me to the End of Time,” “Night Comes On,” and “If It Be Your Will”).
Bob Dylan, a songwriter well-acquainted with Biblical allusions, was the first to champion “Hallelujah,” performing it often in the mid-’80s. And when the 1991 tribute album “I’m Your Fan” concluded with a mesmerizing solo version by John Cale, “Hallelujah” started gaining momentum.
The film covers several more key developments, including the counter-intuitive masterstroke that introduced the song to the grade school set in the 2001 DreamWorks Animation hit “Shrek.”
Goldfine and Geller don’t belabor the point, but early in the film Sloman describes himself as “patient zero” for the “virus” that “Hallelujah” would become. In a recent video call with the filmmakers, Goldfine said that was a bread crumb for “people who are cynical about it” so that viewers didn’t feel locked into a reverent point of view. Cohen seemed to agree. As it becomes a staple in clubs and concert halls, he opines in an interview “people ought to stop singing it for a little while.”
The cynicism fully blossoms toward the end of the film as a montage featuring almost a dozen clips from TV talent shows capture spotlight-seeking singers milking poor “Hallelujah” for every drop of pseudo profundity. It’s a sequence that “showed how the circus developed,” Geller said. But several quieter clips follow, including Yolanda Adams’ rendition at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool during the national COVID-19 memorial in January 2021.
“You can try all you want to abuse this song,” Geller said. “It won’t matter. If someone wants to take it for what it really is, it can be fresh and wonderful.” And transcendent. That’s never more so than on Cohen’s final tour, as another artful sequence weaves together the artist in his element, looking dapper and priestly in his trademark black suit. Hallelujah.
Contact Andrew Gilbert at [email protected].
MEET THE FILMMAKERS
“Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song” opens July 8 at several Bay Area theaters, and San Francisco filmmakers Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine will appear at several screening Q&As this weekend. Here’s a look:
Opera Plaza Cinemas, San Francisco: 7 p.m. July 7 and 4:30 p.m. July 10; details here.
Rialto Cinemas Elmwood, Berkeley: 4 p.m. July 9; details here.
Smith Rafael Film Center, San Rafael: 7 p.m. July 9; details here.
Roxie Theater, San Francisco: 7 p.m. July 8 and 10; details here.
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