The song “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen is one of the most famous songs written in the last half century. It is a song that almost has the status of an anthem, a song that has something in it that is not of this world and a song in which Cohen perfectly managed to hit and mix the spiritual and the worldly. The documentary filmed together by Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfinger is not a classic biographical documentary, but is as much a film about the song itself as it is about its author. Before Cohen’s death at the end of 2016, the directors of the film got to see and use his numerous notebooks, notes and texts that he had created over the years, and they were especially fascinated by the fate of his most famous songs today.
The song he wrote for almost seven years and the song he never managed to finish and over time he wrote as many as 180 stanzas of “Hallelujah” before he finally recorded it in 1984 for the album “Various Positions”. The album that his publisher Columbia Records refused to release and the album was then released by an independent label and practically no one had heard of it. But, as is known today, “Hallelujah” managed to find its way to the hearts of the audience in the meantime, and it succeeded partly thanks to the fact that other musicians like Bob Dylan, John Cale or Jeff Buckley started performing it practically immediately.
So many interlocutors in the film say that for a long time they didn’t even know that it was actually Cohen’s song, and Cohen himself, who we hear through audio recordings of an interview with a Rolling Stone journalist, was completely devastated when his album was rejected. The French photographer Dominique Issermann, who lived with him during that period, and Cohen’s arranger and producer John Lissauer, who worked with Cohen during the seventies and then simply disappeared, talk about that time. And he called him after eight years to work together on an album that, he claims, was fantastic, and he was equally shocked when Columbia turned him down.
Cohen himself tells partly where he got the idea for that song and how it equally reflects his Jewish heritage, spirituality, spirituality and sexuality, and how he was by no means satisfied with the lyrics. As that song is full of symbolism, a real puzzle with countless versions in which he often changed the text during the performance and which haunted him until he finally managed to reach the desired perfection. Cohen talks about the creation of songs and how it was usually a long process, while his friend Bob Dylan would write a hit in 15 minutes in the back seat of a taxi. If I knew where the songs came from, I would go get them more often, Cohen points out in one situation, and it is a great film about a great man, a poet and a harpist, and a song that remains for all time.