“Hydra and Marianne had such an influence of me,” he reflects, almost wistfully, that familiar, honeyed voice cracking slightly. (Photo by James Burke/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images/Getty Images) – Credit: The LIFE Picture Collection via Baby Axel is in a baby carriage in the foreground. Leonard Cohen, Marianne Ihlen and friend sitting in Cohen’s home in Hydra, Greece. It was there that Leonard Cohen, fleeing the cold constraints of Montreal bourgeois life, met Marianne in 1964 and it was into this idyll that the young Nick wandered in 1968.īroomfield narrates the whole story without actually straying into shot, although there are photos of him as a young man, personal reminiscences and clips of his early film work – work which, he confesses, he would not have made without Marianne as inspiration. It was a brief utopia of, as a friend of Marianne’s, interviewed in the film, recalls: “Writing, lovemaking, bathing and drinking and talking in the sun.” The film centres on the Greek island of Hydra, which in the early 1960s was colonised by artists and poets and hedonists who created a commune of free love, drink and drugs there. ![]() ![]() I tried to leave myself out of it but then realised there’s an extra value for the truth of the film that the storyteller was actually there – it gives it an unusual dimension, something very intimate.” Because I was intimately involved with her and she spoke about him so much, I knew the story so well. “It wasn’t that I was desperate to get back on screen or anything but simply I didn’t really think I could tell the story of Marianne without mentioning my involvement. Jensen inspired a number of Cohen’s songs and poems. Cohen had bought a house on the island earlier in the year, while the others were established residents. Pictured are, from second left, Canadian poet, author, and musician Leonard Cohen (second left), unidentified, and married Australian authors George Johnston and Charmian Clift. Norwegian expatriate Marianne Jensen (also known as Ihlen) (left) holds her son, Axel Jensen Jr, on her lap as friends watch, Hydra, Greece, October 1960. “It’s certainly the film I’ve been most personally involved in, from a romantic point of view at least,” says Broomfield who, in truth, has been making fewer on-screen appearances in his recent films. She was also, briefly, the young Nick Broomfield’s lover. ![]() Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love charts a 56-year romance, between singer Leonard Cohen and a Norwegian beauty called Marianne Ihlen, a woman who became Cohen’s muse and the subject of one of his most famous and most tender songs, So Long Marianne. I think it’s one of the year’s best films, too. His insertion into the love story of Marianne & Leonard, however, takes things to another level of personal involvement and results in Broomfield’s most emotionally powerful and beautiful film yet. He’s always inserting himself into his films, becoming familiar in the 1990s for appearing in his white T-shirt and jeans, holding a boom mic, chunky tape recorder slung over his shoulder while confronting, say, a serial killer (Aileen Wuornos in The Selling of a Serial Killer and Life and Death of a Serial Killer), a volatile rock goddess (Courtney Love in Kurt & Courtney) or a Hollywood whistleblower (remember Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madame?). For a documentary film maker Nick Broomfield is a ubiquitous character.
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