Various Positions (35 page)

The opera was filmed and starred Nick Mancuso, Carole Laure, and Frank Augustyn. Furey directed, composed the music (Cohen wrote the lyrics), and supplied the voice for the songs which were lip-synced by Mancuso, a gifted dramatic actor but not a musical star. Carol Laure played the enamored angel. Robert Lantos and James T. Kaufman produced.

The film opened at Cannes on May 17, 1985.
Variety
complained that the music and lyrics were “
reminiscent of the sixties era … [but] as tuneful as the score is, it lacks the necessary power to grip the listener.” The choreography, said
Variety
, was in the style of TV extravaganzas. Coordinated with the film release was a double-album soundtrack recording distributed by the French division of
RCA
with a slightly different cast from that of the film. Cohen and Furey won a Juno for best music score in 1985 for the music to the “rock opera.”

————

COHEN
had an idea for a short film, initially based on the experiences of a hotel and his song “The Guests.” Produced by Barrie Wexler, “I Am a Hotel” was intended for the Canadian pay-TV network, C-Channel, but when the network collapsed and Cohen twice threatened to pull out, Moses Znaimer and City-TV stepped in to complete the production (he is listed as executive producer) with CBC-TV and the Canadian Film Development Corporation assisting with funding.

No one involved really had any experience with rock videos, though. Wexler and Cohen watched various examples at City-TV, settled on a budget of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and started to plan. Several months later Cohen returned to Toronto and told Barrie Wexler that he wanted out of the planned video production, explaining that he couldn’t write a music video in his present state of mind (he was working on a book of psalms). That was a Saturday night, Wexler remembered, and he had promised to deliver a script for the video by Monday morning.
He persuaded Cohen not to give up, and they worked all night. With the help of the Toronto writer Mark Shekter, they put together a thirteen-page treatment. In the interim, singer David Blue had died in New York (Cohen gave the eulogy at the funeral) and Cohen named the production company “Blue Memorial Video” in his honor since Blue had portrayed Cohen onstage in Montreal at the Centaur Theatre production of “The Leonard Cohen Show.”

Wexler and Znaimer lined up the King Edward Hotel for the shooting, set to begin in April 1983. In the meantime, Cohen had gone to Roshi’s New Mexico Zen center, where he could make only one fifteen-minute telephone call a week. The day Wexler was to sign the deal with C-Channel, Cohen telexed to say he had changed his mind, that he would refund the money, and that the project had to be postponed or canceled. Znaimer told Wexler to find Cohen and make him change his mind. Unable to contact him, Wexler went to C-Channel and signed, despite the telex from Cohen in his pocket. He couldn’t speak to Cohen for four days and when he could, he was able, during their fifteen-minute conversation, to convince him to participate, although Cohen wanted to be written out of much of the video.

Four days before filming, Cohen arrived in Toronto, the day the newspapers were saying C-Channel was going to fold. Wexler bought a copy of every Canadian newspaper at the King Edward Hotel’s newsstand where Cohen was staying so he would not learn of the channel’s collapse. Wexler and Znaimer worked through the night to re-finance the project. Three CBC executives were dining together that night and between the first course and dessert, Wexler was able to convince one to come to City-TV’S offices to hear his pitch. That evening Wexler got a call approving the money. The Canadian Film Development Corporation also came through in record time to help finance the film.

Filming took six days. It was a thirty-minute surreal drama, a pastiche of fantasy, song, and dance woven around five sets of lovers (including Cohen) who meet at a grand hotel. Five songs narrated the drama, opening with “The Guests” and moving to “Memories,” “Gypsy Wife,” “Chelsea Hotel,” and finally “Suzanne.” The sequences were shot in both black and white and color. Skating champion Toller Cranston, dancer Ann Ditchburn and the National Ballet’s founder Celia Franca all appeared in
the video. Cohen described the film as “
a kind of carousel, you just see figures moving in and out, and their stories unfold, they find what they want.” There is no dialogue, only the songs and body movement. Wexler explained that what they tried to do was make the singer almost incidental to the dancing, acting, and music. During an interview after the shooting, Cohen said that hotels had always been his natural habitat, “
My personal life is such that there’s nowhere else to
go
. Where does a guy
go
?”

When Cohen saw the film, he hated it. Some scenes had to be re-shot, and more money was needed. Additional sequences, especially for “Suzanne,” were added by the post-production director, Don Allen. Editing was a long and stressful process, but when Cohen saw the final product, he was thrilled. The film was broadcast on May 7, 1984, and beat out entries from thirty-two other countries to win the Golden Rose award at the 24th International Montreux Television Festival. It also received a special mention in the Critic’s Choice category. Critics praised the work and saw a transition in Cohen’s work from the erotic and experimental to the traditional, with worship and redemption as the new focus. Cohen, Wexler, and Znaimer suggested that their next video would be an adaptation of
The Favorite Game
, but it has never been made.

Cohen realized that one “
must assume an alarming flexibility,” and that projects undertaken without structure could sometimes succeed, while those that were planned could fail. He recognized that he was an inflexible man for the most part. “
I like to get up at 3 : 00 a.m. to the sound of a bell … Flexibility for me is a position I’m hounded into—and I don’t like it.” Order, structure, and discipline were his strengths.

————

AS HE APPROACHED FIFTY
, Cohen felt he needed to re-evaluate his direction once more. He was at last ready to “
get down to a Jew’s business.” The spiritual quest came in part from an inability to do anything else. “
I was silenced in all areas. I couldn’t move…. It was the only way I could penetrate through my predicament.” What he discovered was “
the courage to write down my prayers. To apply to the source of mercy … I found that the act of writing was the proper form for my prayer.”
His efforts resulted in a book of psalms first titled
The Name
, then
The Shield
, and finally
Book of Mercy
. Asked to describe it, Cohen cryptically claimed the book is either “
inspired or it isn’t; it either rings true or it doesn’t.
I think it does … I’m happy for being able to write it because the writing of it, in some ways, was the answer to the prayer.” But Cohen was hesistant to have the material published; he felt it was risky because it was so unlike his last book,
Death of A Lady’s Man
.

Book of Mercy
was published by McClelland & Stewart in April. “
It came from an intense desire to speak in that way,” he said of the odd form, “And you don’t speak in that way unless you feel truly cornered, unless you feel truly desperate and you feel urgency in your life…. I also wanted to affirm the traditions I had inherited.” In the book, Cohen follows the Old Testament practice of numbering rather than titling the psalms. The book contains fifty psalms, marking Cohen’s age. Like the biblical psalms, the psalms in
Book of Mercy
deal with longing and self-abnegation; “
Broken in the unemployment of my soul, I have driven a wedge into your world, fallen on both sides of it. Count me back to your mercy with the measures of a bitter song, and do not separate me from my tears.” He also recorded several of the psalms with a string quartet in a Los Angeles studio in 1984. Henry Lewy engineered the recording, but it was never released.

Critics were unsure what to make of the book, a position similar to Cohen’s: “
It’s a tricky thing to publish a book like this. I really don’t know what section of the bookstore it should be in … It’s not a quarrel, it’s not an argument, it’s not theology; it is just an asking.” Some wondered how the poet who appeared to possess such venom in
Death of A Lady’s Man
could now possess such spiritual love. Others felt that it added another dimension to Cohen’s work. In July 1985, he won the Canadian Authors Association Literature Prize for lyrical poetry for the book, receiving five thousand dollars, although the recognition didn’t affect his anxiety: “
Everyone is in some kind of fix. Writing is my trade, and I treat my fix that way. When I’m feeling good about my work, I call it my vocation; when I’m feeling ordinary about it, I call it my trade.”

Book of Mercy
was mystical, spiritual, and indulgent, displaying none of the lyricism of his early work or the anger of his later. The focus of his longing was no longer a woman, but a desire to find spiritual fulfillment.
Prayer, he acknowledged, was not in. “We’re such a hip age. Nobody wants to affirm those realities. It doesn’t go with your sunglasses,” he explained to one critic.

The reawakening of his Judaism in the eighties took another form as he transposed Hebrew prayer into his songs. “Who by Fire” is based on the Hebrew melody for the prayer “Mi Bamayim, Mi Ba Esh” sung at the Musaf or noontime service on Yom Kippur. “If It Be Your Will” was also borrowed from Jewish prayer, originating in a phrase from the Kol Nidre service on Yom Kippur eve where, just before the listing of sins, the petitioner cries, “
May it therefore be Your will, Lord our God, and God of our Fathers, to forgive us all our sins, to pardon all our iniquities, to grant us atonement for all our transgressions.” The melody for Cohen’s song is derived from the synagogue song.

————

Various Positions
was the musical counterpoint to
Book of Mercy
. Cohen acknowledged that he had really started to slave over his songwriting. Until 1983, he could write more or less on the run, or at least on the tour buses, in the hotel rooms, in the airplanes, in bed. What altered his attitude from working hard to giving everything to his craft was a growing sense of mortality as he approached fifty. “
I had no idea how hard the task was,” he told an interviewer in 1993,

He was broke, he had a lot of financial obligations, and he felt his career had more or less evaporated. But he perservered: “I bought my first synthesizer and I started working in a way that I have never worked before,” Cohen said. “I had always worked hard, but I really threw myself into this. The work was very intense, very clear.” In 1993 he explained this new intensity in a characteristically laconic, yet ironic
manner: “I don’t know why, but something happened to me ten years ago. When things got really desperate, I started to cheer up.” Around 1984, the alternative rock scene began to rediscover his music when Sisters of Mercy and Nick Cave started to do cover versions of his songs. “
The initial thing had passed,” Cohen said. The mainstream audience was dwindling, but the alternative culture was tuning in to his work.

On hearing
Various Positions
, Bob Dylan commented that Cohen’s songs were becoming more like prayers. For this album, his first in five years, Cohen also relied on extensive backup vocals. One of the reasons for the album’s success was producer John Lissauer, who had assisted on
Recent Songs
. He created a unique sound that reflected the spiritual feeling Cohen wanted to convey. His song “The Law,” possibly referring to the Torah, reinforced his realization of a powerful and long-lasting set of principles that must control the behavior of men and women. The law has frequently called him but he had not responded until recently: “
I left everybody / But I never went straight.”

But religion didn’t dominate the record. “Coming Back to You” is something of a country and western song, narrating the determination of the lover/worker/prisoner to return to a woman, despite her transgressions. “Dance Me to the End of Love” marks his return to love from hate, from the breakup with Suzanne to the new joy with Dominique. One of the most troubling songs on the album, and perhaps the most autobiographical, is “The Night Comes On.” In five verses Cohen rewrites his life, beginning with his mother, his childhood fears, and her death. The 1973 war in Israel and the peace following is linked to his father’s death. He also alludes to his unhappy marriage with characteristic clarity:

“If It Be Your Will,” with Jennifer Warnes singing harmony, made for a haunting conclusion to the album.

Cohen had recorded the album in New York for CBS but they decided not to release it in the U.S. It was released in Europe, where it was felt his European audience was more adaptable. But in the U.S., tolerance for Cohen’s already uncommercial style was being stretched with an album of religious themes.
Various Positions
made the Top Ten in Spain, Portugal, and Scandinavia, and fared modestly well in England. In the U.S. it was finally released by Passport Records, a division of JEM records, but only a few thousand copies were pressed.

Cohen told an interviewer that his audience in North America had dried up, although in Europe it had remained loyal. Europeans appreciated “
people who can’t sing but whose voices are connected to the heart…. In the secret chambers of my heart, I consider myself a singer; on good days, I consider myself a stylist.”

Cohen said that he couldn’t really mount tours in North America because his record company was not behind him. During the seventies and into the eighties, the company seemed to release his records in secret. He referred to the CBS building in New York as “
the Tomb of the Unknown Record.” When the interviewer asked Cohen what occupation he would list if he were filling out an application, Cohen replied, “
Sinner.”