Lenny, or: a normative rant about how to film a concert

Review
Leonard Cohen
Live in London
DVD
(Columbia) 

I often wonder with concert DVDs who watches them and the circumstances under which they watched. Is it people who missed the concert and want to catch up? Or is it people who saw the concert and want a momento? And do they watch it alone or they do they invite friends round and make a night of it? All of the above, I know, but I mean mainly. What exactly is the market for a concert DVD?

It’s just that, to me, they are generally disappointing. They can’t ever capture the the thrill of being there with real live musicians doing their thing; and the communal experience of being thronged in with a big bunch of like-minded people can never be replicated in your lounge room, unless maybe you are the guy who owns Ikea and have a really big lounge room and 5000 friends to invite over. But even then, it’s not live, so it’s not the same. It can all add up to a let down.

This DVD of Leonard Cohen’s London concert from July 2008 is good, but it suffers from the sorts of problems I’m alluding to. (Let me make it clear, in case I haven’t already, just so I’m not set upon by the Cohen zealots, bless their understandable hearts, that I’m reviewing the DVD here, not a live concert.)

One common problem with this sort of concert film is that you get way too many close-up shots of the band members, particularly the lead performer, in this case, Cohen. I don’t know why film-makers do this. It’s like they think that shoving a camera into a person’s face and other places, almost to the point colonoscopy in some cases, will somehow make up for the intimacy you miss by not being at the actual concert. It doesn’t. So stop it.

I don’t want to see every line on the performer’s face. I want to see the musicians reacting to each other, working off each, and even how they relate to the audience they are actually with. This means wider shots taking in, as much as possible, the band in its entirety. Sure, the occasional close-up would be nice, at some key moment, but beyond that, let me watch the concert, not the guy’s nose hairs.

Also, it should be a law that only people with some working knowledge of the instruments involved should be allowed to operate cameras at a concert. This should apply doubly for those filming guitarists. I am so sick of watching footage of some great guitarist — and in this DVD, Cohen is blessed by the presence of Javier Mas in particular — and the bloody camera lingers for long periods on the players’ right hand (presuming a righhanded guitarist, so I mean, lingers on the hand doing the strumming and/or picking).

Actually, in this case, some lingering shots of Mas’s righthand isn’t such a bad thing given that his style, steeped as it is in that trilling Greek bouzouki-type playing, relies so much on the exquisite control he evinces with his righthand, but the point still stands. When you have some hot guitarist up there burning up the fretboard, or coaxing lyrical licks out of carefully chosen notes up and down the neck, then YOU WANT TO SEE THE NECK, THE FRETBOARD! NOT THE GUY’S RIGHT HAND! In fact, you want to see both hands, how they work together.

So again, the preferred shot would be a mid-range shot that lets you see the whole guitar and both hands doing what they are doing. Don’t care about the player’s face. Wanna see the hands. Together. Get it?

All these problems are here on this disc and as you might’ve noticed, they kinda bug me. But still, I enjoyed every minute of this long DVD. The song list is pretty much everything you would want and the overall picture and sound quality are excellent.

I did have some issues with some of the musical arrangements, but that is more a problem with the way songs are put together than with the DVD per se. I love Cohen’s singing and l love the idea of him using three woman singers to accompany him, but I do think the arrangement of the two was a bit pedestrian, a bit of a wasted opportunity.

An interesting comparison is say, between the version here of ‘Sisters of Mercy’ and the version that shows up on the earlier Cohen film, I’m Your Man, with Martha Wainwright and the McGarrigle Sisters. The latter interpretation takes the song to a whole new level, with all those mesmerising harmonies, and yeah, it does make this version look a bit run of the mill.

But big deal, eh? This is a great concert DVD. Some of his ye olde classics shine, like ‘First We Take Manhattan’ and ‘Suzanne’, though the track I particularly loved was ‘Boogie Street’, in which his collaborator, as he calls her, Sharon Robinson, takes the lead vocal. Fab.

So I guess Lenny fans will love this and I don’t blame them. I did too. But geez, I would really love one day to see a concert film which eschewed the usual bullshit close-ups and the uninformed camera pointing at great musicians doing their thing and that actually just let you watch the gig in a form as close as possible to replicating the live experience.