The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, January 18-24
Leonard Cohen: Bird on a Wire (1972/2010)
Directed by Tony Palmer
By the early 70s, Leonard Cohen was already a successful singer-songwriter and published author, but his prophet-like charisma and romantic reputation was still a work in progress. Cohen was used to performing solo, but for his 1972 tour through Europe and Israel he was accompanied by a new set of talented musicians to play a total of twenty concerts. It was a difficult tour for Cohen—he thought of himself as a weak singer and even offered to pay audiences back their money in a couple of concerts. British filmmaker Tony Palmer beautifully captured it all in his documentary, Bird on a Wire.
Palmer was granted full access. He frames Cohen and his band in intimate close-ups, cutting back and forth between performances and their lives on the road. Palmer’s incredible access allows us to witness some deeply emotional, private moments. In one instance, Cohen sits backstage in Jerusalem, with the neck of his guitar pressed against his forehead, tears rolling down his face. It dawns on him that he just performed the last concert of this long and exhausting tour. We hear the crowd singing and cheering for more but Cohen can’t put himself together for another song. In his extraordinary and heartbreaking New Yorker profile last October, Cohen recalls this moment, “So I go out on the stage with the band… and I started singing ‘So Long, Marianne.’ And I see Marianne straight in front of me and I started crying.” It’s unclear whether his overwhelmed state was due to Marianne, some acid he took earlier, the fact that it was Jerusalem, or because it was the last concert of the tour… probably all four but nevertheless, I can’t think of a better way to end a Leonard Cohen story. Alejandro Veciana (January 18-31 at Film Forum; showtimes daily)