TIFF '11: We we came from

My first report from the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival is coming shamefully late. My only excuse is that I’ve been traveling, sort of all over the place—Tijuana, San Diego, Denver—and not every stop was strictly voluntary. Yet this sense of steady movement was not inappropriate for what constituted one of yesterday’s highlights, the Mavericks session at the Princess of Wales Theatre that included the world premiere of Jonathan Demme’s Neil Young Journeys, followed by an onstage discussion between programmer Thom Powers, Demme and Young, whose endearingly dry humour and utterly relaxed demeanor charmed the hell out of everybody.


Neil Young Journeys is both a concert movie and a road movie. It shifts between pleasingly unfussy coverage of Young’s pair of recent solo performances at Massey Hall—just a few blocks away from the Princess—and Young’s journey in a Crown Victoria from Omemee (“...a town in North Ontario...”), where he spent part of his childhood, to Toronto for the show. Along the way are amusing recollections of youth, like the one about the kid named Goof who gave Young a nickel to eat tar or tell an old lady she had a fat ass, some very pretty scenery, and Young’s confession that, despite his career-long obsession with maximum sound quality, the car is still his preferred place to listen to music.


No car stereo has anything on the sound system at the Princess however, which Young tweaked so that we listened to Journeys at 96 kilohertz—the first time in history a film was exhibited so thunderously. Given his subject, Demme most often smartly opts to hold images a long while rather than try to impose excitement through a lot of needless cutting. So we get extended shots of Young’s little beak of an upper lip perched on the edge of his harmonica and the tear in the pinch of his beat-up white fedora, or, just as memorably, Young’s face as seen through a psychedelically lit gob of spit clinging to his microphone micro-cam. The songs were mainly culled from Young recent Daniel Lanois-produced Le Noise and from his breakthrough period of 40 years ago. Young’s murder ballad ‘Down By the River’ ends with a wonderfully spooky and hushed “There is no reason for you to hide...” There’s a stirring rendition of ‘After the Gold Rush’ performed on pump organ and harmonica, and an industrial-strength ‘Ohio’ on a Les Paul. The show ends with a terrifically feedback-operatic ‘Walk With Me.’ But among the newer material the song that made the biggest impression on me was ‘You Never Call’—a song that cries out to be covered by Willie Nelson—in which Young repeats a line that evokes death as “the ultimate vacation with no back pain,” and spots a dead friend’s car in the parking lot outside a hockey game.

The onstage Q&A was a little too brief. It featured a very funny story from Demme about how he and Young first met, the happy revelation that Young is writing a memoir, and one-too-many old schoolchums in the audience who just wanted to say hi. Still, the atmosphere was palpably affectionate, imbued with the feeling that each of us has a road of differing lengths behind us, and we were all of us sharing a very memorable stop.

A singer must cry: Bird on a Wire on DVD

Leonard Cohen’s recent return to the world’s stages after a decade and a half of relative reclusion has, among other things, served to remind us just how magnetic a presence the soon-to-be 76 year old troubadour can be. Few performers combine Cohen’s particular blend of humility and authority, gravity and humour—he’s a consummate showman who seems metabolically incapable of taking his audience’s adoration for granted. Yet Cohen, who only began his career as a recording artist in his mid-30s, who insisted on singing his own material despite the limitations of his voice, whose musical styles have only intermittently dovetailed in any way with the transitory fashions of that have marked his 40+ years in music, has also at times revealed a deep personal ambivalence to touring—which might help explain the hiatus. The tension between Cohen the showman and Cohen the tender, at times mercurial poet obsessed with communion and not “cheating” his audience, his band, or himself with anything less than emotional honesty is very much a part of what makes his concerts as riveting and even transcendental. This tension is eloquently captured in Tony Palmer’s documentary Bird on a Wire.

The 1972 European tour, which ended in Israel and was plagued by technical problems, which featured Cohen’s famed producer Bob Johnston on organ and the angelic Jennifer Warnes sharing back-up vocals with Donna Washburn, possesses a certain mythical status in Cohen’s biography. I’d read many years ago about the final concert in Jerusalem where Cohen dropped acid and wept on stage during a performance of ‘So Long, Marianne.’ The story always had this apocryphal tinge to it. I never believed I’d actually see the event on film, but here it is. It almost wasn’t. After getting a limited release in a reportedly messily assembled version unauthorized by Palmer in 1974, Bird on a Wire vanished. It was only in 2009 that 294 rolls of original film were discovered, re-assembled and restored by Palmer for its new, first-ever DVD release from Conveyer.

Cohen was 37 then, at one of many career peaks, and clearly magnetic on a number of levels—we actually see him decline invitations from not one but two different Euro-babes who approach him after a performance. He initially seems rather serious but soon enough regains his trademark deadpan humour and sense of mischief and camaraderie. He improvises an ode to a speaker that refuses to stop emitting some galactic-sounding feedback. He invites audience members to come up on stage to hear the music better when the PA shuts down completely. He improvises a self-satirizing introduction for himself: “Leonard Cohen is going to sing songs of anguish and despair… The skulls appear… They’re lowered by wires by a man above the stage…”

Once the songs are properly begun they’re all of them magic. A rendition of ‘Suzanne’ with spectral organ and bubbling bass is especially buoyant. He and the band imbue ‘Story of Isaac’ with an extra layer of portent. ‘Please Don’t Pass Me By’ is used as a sort of call to arms. And of course there’s ‘Marianne.’ Cohen had already left the stage once that night, apologizing profusely but insisting that things just weren’t working. Yet the audience, many of them teenagers, won’t have it. At one point they offer to sing to him if he’d just come back out. There’s a hilarious bit where, while backstage and still uncertain he can continue, Cohen convinces himself that what he really needs is to shave, and shave he does—if he can only stop laughing. Most impressively, he doesn't cut himself. It’s unclear whether or not he ever actually confessed to the audience that he was already deep in the throes of his LSD trip.

Palmer’s career as a filmmaker—he’s also worked in theatre and opera and as a critic—has been grounded in an interest not only in music but also portraiture. His eclectic range of subjects have included Cream, Maria Callas, the Beatles, Ginger Baker, and Benjamin Britten. His most famous film is probably the 1971 batty satirical rock flick 200 Motels, co-written and co-directed by its featured performer, Frank Zappa. Bird on a Wire benefits as much from Palmer’s obvious facility with gaining superb coverage of musical performances with apparently skeletal resources as it does from its wide-ranging access to off-stage business and Cohen’s personal transparency. All of the original coverage, photographed by Les Young, looks terrific, particularly for its distinctive framing of strikingly lit faces during the performances. All of what appears to be new post-production work however—the titles, the cutaways to home movies, the recycling of scenes from Don Owen’s 1965 film Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen, or most especially the images of violence in Vietnam—look comparatively hokey, at times in poor taste, and, above all, unnecessary. The image and sound captured during the actual tour easily stand on their own without this additional contextualizing. Thankfully, the original material is about 95% of what we get here, which makes Bird on a Wire essential viewing for fans of Cohen and of tour documentaries in general.