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.

House arrest: Paranormal Activity

She’s a nice girl, but she has a history. She’s been followed all her life by something unseen, something which makes its presence felt in other ways. Katie is an English major, good-humoured, pretty, but somehow plain. Micah is a day trader with a large house for them to share. He’s got average guy looks, style and attitude, and an average guy’s fear of commitment. Everything about Katie, Micah and the house they occupy is so rigorously ordinary it’s nearly anonymous. There’s almost no décor to speak of. They don’t have photos on their computer desktops. But we know people like this, who like things new and clean and comfortably boring. Their relationship is founded on such unspoken acceptance of the status quo. Their characterless home becomes a blank slate upon which fear can slowly spread across.

Everything we see and hear in Paranormal Activity is transmitted through Micah’s video camera. There are noises in the night. Soon there will be movement. A sober psychic will visit, but he claims what they’ve got here’s a demon, and he’s strictly a ghost man. He gives them the number of a good demonologist, but the demonologist is out of town and they have to wait, with only Micah’s camera, an occult guidebook, and a Ouija board for protection. Of course they have each other, but their nerves are getting mutually rattled and, despite Katie’s repeated protests, Micah won’t stop taunting whatever is stalking her. Micah’s cocky—he thinks he knows how the movie is going to end. You could say Paranormal Activity is a parable of martial anxiety. Micah regards his camera as a sort of erotic appendage. He asks Katie to kiss it. Micah wants to get busy on camera, but Katie isn’t willing to consummate. Micah jokes that they’re engaged to be engaged, which is another way of saying that the force of Katie’s domesticating presence may be scarier to him than any malevolent demon.

Orin Peli’s micro-budget debut, arriving in theatres ten years after The Blair Witch Project, an obvious precursor both in form and marketing strategies, is flawed in several ways but perfectly ingenious nonetheless. It succumbs, like that other Blair Witch offspring [REC], to the habit of over-explaining the persistence of the running camera. It distracts with questions as to why this nice, if troubled young woman wants to be with this idiot, whose callousness is overstated. The film would benefit immensely from shaving off the last 30 seconds or so, when the sudden intrusion of corny horror movie effects sucks the air out of the documentary verisimilitude. (This ending, shot after Peli’s original cut was completed, was reportedly suggested by Steven Spielberg, an early fan and instrumental in the film’s distribution.) But Paranormal Activity still works, at times brilliantly so.


The most inspired shot in the whole thing is the one repeated over and over, one that almost echoes Michael Haneke or David Lynch. Micah’s camera is set up to monitor their bedroom while the couple sleeps. The results are mostly static, which is the masterstroke. Our eyes dart between the people sleeping, the gloom beyond the bedroom door, and the in-camera clock, which speeds up for expediency and then slows down just when that dreaded something is going to happen. Was that a murmur? A shadow? Was that just a breeze? This anticipation is what bad dreams are made of.

It bears comparison to The Strangers, a movie with an unusually large gap between the eloquence of its premise and the inanity of its resolution. Like The Strangers, Paranormal Activity concerns a couple at a turning point in their relationship, isolated in a single location, their anxiety seeming to manifest as an intruder determined to get inside. In a sense the entire story becomes a sort of sex act, or slow rape. The intruder, the ostensible demon, penetrates the house little by little, lubricating the cavity, if you will, until it’s made its way fully inside, fusing the alliance between sex and death inherent in these stories. But unlike many stories of this kind, Paranormal Activity understands the importance of restraint. And it doesn’t climax early.

TIFF '09: "Without patience you can't be a fisherman..." Two new films from Mexico

My most treasured discovery at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival came from Mexican filmmaker Rigoberto Pérezcano, whose previous film, XV en Zaachila, was, quite tellingly, a documentary. Northless, co-written by Pérezcano with his producer Edgar San Juan, is imbued with a vivid and intimate sense of place, even if its themes finally have something to do with the difficulty of finding a place where one truly belongs. It follows its protagonist Andrés (Harold Torres, marvelous) from his native Oaxaca to Tijuana, where he makes a series of fumbling attempts to illegally enter the US but unintentionally begins cultivating an attachment to a handful of individuals who give him work, food, and shelter while he comes up with his next scheme to trespass the frontier.


Its interesting to note that the Spanish title of the film is Norteado, which means to be disoriented, or without a compass, or without a sense of north. The English title, though clearly an inaccurate translation, actually strikes me as the richer one, because it makes the north seem like a paradise, which is to say a place that doesn’t really exist, and it renders Andrés a man who is missing something, who suffers from the absence of some state of being he seems to think is necessary for living. His ostensible destination feels increasingly abstract as the story goes on, and his glimpses of it are delivered in a very amusing sort of shorthand—side-by-side headshots of George W. Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger—whereas the transitory life he establishes along the border—the most northernmost point he seems able to get to—grows only more welcoming.


What makes the film such a refreshing take on the border-crossing genre is above all its tone. About a third of the way through I suddenly became aware of the fact that the film wasn’t a drama but a comedy, albeit of a very subtle, unassuming kind, pitched somewhere between Jim Jarmusch and Charles Burnett in its use of deadpan humour, static images, repetition, seductive music, and situational comedy. There’s a tremendous warmth that emanates from the film once we get to the scene where our hero finds himself sitting in the front seat of a truck, drinking cans of Tecate and eating peanuts with the older woman who’s taken him in, partly out of kindness and partly out of reasons of her own. The film builds to a climatic sequence that’s too inventive and hilarious to spoil here. I hope you’ll have a chance to see it, and since the latest rumours have it that Mantarraya might be coming on as distributors, the chances seem decent.


I was less impressed with To the Sea, the Mexican film about three generations of men living in a remote fishing community in the Caribbean. I know many people who were deeply impressed by this work, but its beauty struck me as being strictly of the postcard variety, a very conventional perspective on an obviously wildly gorgeous locale. (Young filmmakers should always be leery of locations that offer nothing but spectacular beauty.) The child featured in the film, as well as the egret he befriends, are wonderfully natural presences on screen, but I couldn’t help but feel astonished by how little writer/director Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio brings to the proceedings. His hand as filmmaker is so light it barely seems to exist. It becomes difficult to believe that the characters wouldn’t have more to work out between them. I genuinely believe that Gonzalez-Rubio spent a lot of time with his subjects, got to know them and their lifestyle well. I just can’t believe the dearth of insight into their characters’ experiences he managed to conjure on film. To the Sea feels like a hybrid of a nature documentary and a home movie, but I have to say that I’ve seen better nature documentaries, and I’ve even seen better home movies. Incidentally, this film was in fact produced and will be distributed under the auspices of Mantarraya, though I’m not certain how they plan to get it out to a larger public.

More TIFF notes still to come...

It Couldn't Please Me More: Chris and Don on DVD

It’s among the most daunting challenges in movies, a medium saturated with romance but often adverse to romantic complication: to convey with empathy and insight the nature and functionality of different kinds of love, especially those easily dismissed or judged. That romance between men is but the least provocative kind of love considered in Chris and Don: A Love Story is a tribute to how bravely and sensitively this documentary assumes this challenge. Its lovers shared a 35-year relationship that prodded conventional wisdom about class, monogamy, age difference, and, perhaps most interestingly, the compatibility of lovers of whose interaction incorporates parent-child or master-protégé dynamics. Directed by Tina Mascara and Guido Santi, who make elegant use of the couple's abundance of home movies, Chris and Don is a tender and thoughtful portrait of intimacy and communion finding its own pattern in a world fraught with obstacles.

Those obstacles would not however include obscurity or poverty. The titular Chris is Christopher Isherwood, the blue-blood Brit of the global literary set and author of Berlin Stories, the basis for the stage and screen phenomena known as Cabaret. Isherwood met Don Bachardy on a Santa Monica beach in 1953. He was 48, Don 18, though he looked even younger. Their relationship grew steadily but was frowned upon by even close friends. Don must have seemed so unformed, often attending parties with the likes of Auden, Stravinsky and Tennessee Williams, where his presence would register as little more than a fetching accessory, so impressionable that despite his So-Cal roots he adopted a mid-Atlantic accent and many of Isherwood’s gestures, not to mention haircut. But he stuck around. And thanks in part to Isherwood’s support and mentorship Bachardy became a renown portrait artist. (Samples of his work are featured not only in the film but in the booklet in Zeitgeist’s new DVD.)

When Isherwood died in 1986 Bachardy explains how he immediately, almost unconsciously, began to read Isherwood’s diaries, patiently working his way backwards through this extraordinary life, knowing that somewhere in the middle he would find his own first appearance. Like so many things in Chris and Don, this factoid can initially seem creepy, yet slowly becomes something very moving in its manifestation of trust and a sort of sublime exchange of ideas, body and soul. Bachardy’s our guide on this journey through the past, and his recollections and manner feel honest, calm and forthcoming. He’s also an interesting subject for a film in that film itself was so formative an influence in his youth—his mother took him to see Joan Crawford films when he was four. A pivotal moment in his maturity came when he was on the set of The Rose Tattoo and heard Anna Magnani’s fart. The fart helped him to pentrate the veneer of vacuous movie glamour and, we can assume from the development of his work, take interest on the richness of human life that lurked below. It’s but one of the irreverent, surprisingly sweet anecdotes that make Chris and Don a lively, smart, and emotionally intense experience.

Roman à clé: Marina Zenovich probes deeper into the Polasnki scandal

It is a subject that’s no doubt ruined a lot of dinner parties over the years, chained as it is to one of those bottom lines that inspire such knee-jerk responses as to block out rational discussion. The subject is Roman Polanski, to some a filmmaker with an outstanding legacy accompanied by a biography rife with dynamicism, romance and tragedy, to others a pedophile. Period. Well, for those disposed to pursuing the subject a little further, who might appreciate some detailed analysis cultivated away from the heat lamps of unshakable moral righteousness, you’d do well to consult Marina Zenovich’s Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, a smart, unfussy, engrossing documentary that examines the farcical trial which finally led to Polanski’s fleeing the US in 1978 before its conclusion.

For those just tuning in: in March of 1977, Polanski met with Samantha Geimer at Jack Nicholson’s house on Mulholland Drive. They were to take photos. Geimer was interested in a career as a model, perhaps an actress. Polanski had already helped the “arrival” of the teenage actress Nastassja Kinski, with whom he’d also had a notorious affair. The informal photo shoot, at which neither Nicholson nor anyone else was present, quickly turned into something far more tawdry, if not exactly shocking. Polanski gave drugs to Geimer and had sex with her. She was only 13-years-old. Polanski was subsequently arrested and changed with a litany of offences, including rape and sodomy, eventually pleading guilty only to having consensual sex with an under-aged person when evidence, ie: soiled panties, made it clear that a plea bargain would be highly advisable. But the case developed in such a way that closure was to prove far more complicated and elusive than either Polanski, Geimer or their respective attorneys had hoped for. Geimer, who has publicly forgiven Polanski and even advocated for his being given the Academy Award for The Pianist, has said that in the end she felt like both of them got stuck with life sentences, so relentless was the aftermath and media frenzy.

Zenovich’s agenda with Wanted and Desired necessarily divorces itself from sermonizing over Polanski’s unquestioned culpability as an instigator in an unlawful and immoral sexual act. The concern of the film rather is to shed light on the audacious miscarriage of justice to which Polanski and, in effect, Geimer were both subjected to at the hands of the presiding judge, Laurence Rittenband. Judge Rittenband was himself a known ladies’ man and, more to the point, a tireless seeker of media attention. Having died in 1994, he’s unable to defend himself here, and it’s a pity, because he is so thoroughly lambasted by everyone involved, not only those working for Polanski’s defense, but by Geimer and her own attorney, Roger Gunson, who was so outraged by the degree of indecision, manipulation and outright stage management imposed on the case by Rittenband that, in a memorable closing interview, he confesses that he actually sympathizes with Polanski’s choice to flee justice under the given circumstances.

It’s at once a great story and precisely the sort that everyone only thinks they know. Zenovich works through the material methodically, utilizing fresh and mostly insightful testimony from a wide variety of subjects with diverse or opposing stakes in Polanski’s reputation—even Mia Farrow, who clearly has her own opinions about older men giving unwholesome attention to young girls. With an elegant interweaving of archival photographs and home movies, Zenovich manages to account for the almost unimaginable hardships of Polanski’s life—his survival of the Holocaust, the slaughter of his wife and unborn child and the horrific implications made by the press in its wake—without ever using these facts as an excuse for Polanski’s own aberrant behaviour. And of course the wealth of contextualizing fragments from Polanski’s own often very dark films—especially The Tenant, in which Polanski starred, and whose trailer promises that “no one can do it to you like Roman Polanski!”—is exploited to considerable effect by Zenovich and her editor P.G. Morgan, whose contribution to the film’s shape was great enough to merit his own writing credit.

“For as far back as I can remember, the line between fantasy and reality has been hopelessly blurred.” So goes the opening sentence of Polanski’s 1984 memoir, Roman. His life and its scandals, nearly as much as his body of work, which includes some of the most simultaneously seductive and grotesque American films ever made, embodies both our collective fantasy life and its shadow side as few others do. We may just understand both of these things a little better for peering into the nitty-gritty of how it all came to be.

Hot Docs 2008: home movies that come back to haunt us

Though it was as diverse as ever in its programming of movies from everywhere and about, seemingly, everything, this year’s well-attended Hot Docs International Documentary Festival, which wrapped on Sunday night, was for me something of a primer on the shape of docs to come—that shape being defined by the wild proliferation of consumer-level audiovisual technology over the last half-century and our impulse to record our lives as a method of either verifying or coping with it. A few years ago Capturing the Friedmans brought home movies into the theatre with an iconoclastic layer of threat, the past coming back to haunt us in living—if deteriorated—colour, while Tarnation clarified that a more personal sort of non-fiction was to become an increasingly dominant genre. Neither of these movies were the first to use home movies in an inventive way, but they were popular, inflammatory, and influential.

Skip ahead to 2008 and we find Must Read After My Death, Morgan Dews’ investigation into the private turmoil of his grandparents and their children, a work composed almost entirely of Super 8 footage taken by the family and unnervingly candid audio recordings they made for each other as a therapeutic device. With the mise-en-scène confined to the construction of a montage that will convey insight through canny or poetic juxtaposition, the movie unfolds as a collective public testament to the troubles of open marriage, patriarchal resentment and experimental psychiatry that none of the participants actually intended to make.

Her Name is Sabine is French actress Sandrine Bonnaire’s absolutely devastating portrait of her sister, who in the last fifteen years has slipped from a reasonably functional, autonomous person living with autism to a heavy, sluggish woman in need of constant care and living in a ceaseless, at times nightmarish, drug fog. Bonnaire’s manipulation of a lifetime of family movies is sly, artful, moving and finally deeply respectful, as it should be. The most powerful moments arise when the images of Sabine from the past—a playful, attractive woman with a striking gaze—finally converge with the present. Sabine watches her old self and recognizes all to well what’s transpired. Her flood of anxiety is almost unbearable, an effect you’re not likely to shake off for some time. I very much hope you’ll have the opportunity to see it soon.

Another work, not quite as reliant on personal archives but certainly made more poignant through the intermingling of past and present, was the festival’s opening night gala, Sacha Gervasi’s awesomely titled Anvil!: The Story of Anvil, which chronicles the mostly middling fortunes of the titular Toronto metal band that’s spent its career perpetually on the cusp of success, despite its ardent cult following and the adulation of numerous metal heavyweights. The movie is surely destined for great things, if for no other reason that it’s so damn endearing, with Anvil originators Lipps and Robb Reiner (a drummer named after the director of This is Spinal Tap: further evidence that truth is stranger than fiction) exhibiting an uncommon depth of long-term, contentious, ultimately redeeming friendship.

Citizen Havel, shot over an 11-year period by Pavel Koutecky, proposes an interesting variation on the home movie theme, in that all the footage was accumulated with the explicit intention of being used in a documentary yet it possesses the candidness of something far more personal. Koutecky was granted access to the charismatic former Czech president’s home and work life of a level unmatched in political history, thus we’re able to witness speeches being spun and decisions being mulled over, as well as Havel’s relationships shifting, his despair over the death of his wife, his killing of approximately 96,000 cigarettes, and his visits with everyone from Bill Clinton—who plays a mean ‘Summertime’ on the sax at a Prague nightclub—to The Rolling Stones.

Perhaps no other use of home movies seen at Hot Docs 2008 could ever equal the caustic effect of Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure, his "non-fiction horror movie" and graphic investigation into what went down in the Abu Ghraib prison back in 2003. At the dark heart of the story remain the photos and videos, shared, copied and spread around, made by the US military staff guilty of the torture, sexual humiliation and various other sorts of abuse of Iraqi inmates. As Morris interrogates the interrogators, the question lingers: if we can presume that at least some of these people knew what they were doing was so incredibly wrong, why in the hell did they amass—and flaunt—so much evidence of their crime? While most films at Hot Docs have an uncertain future, S.O.P. is among the few that will thankfully be coming to a theatre near you.