leonardcohenforum.com

LisaLCFan wrote: ↑Sat Dec 28, 2024 1:11 am I finally got around to watching this series. TV to slit your wrists by, is a phrase that comes to mind. Talk about depressing and dreary. Leonard and co. from that era were just too dysfunctional and unhappy for me to enjoy spending 8 hours watching them self-destruct.

mirka wrote: ↑Thu Jan 02, 2025 12:11 pm Thank you Lisa, for saving me from watching this misery + dysfunction...

Nothing left to do wrote: ↑Sun Feb 02, 2025 5:08 pm one final question: Does anyone know if and how it is possible to download the eight episodes from the ARD Mediathek?

Nothing left to do wrote: ↑Sun Feb 02, 2025 5:08 pm The outside scenes in Hydra give a believable and convincing impression of the island in the 60s although it presumbly looks rather different today.

Hartmut wrote: ↑Sun Feb 02, 2025 6:09 pm
You can use this tool:
https://mediathekviewweb.de/

Here are some (German language) instructions:
https://www.pcwelt.de/article/1201020/a ... eht-s.html

It seems to work. I just tried it out with the trailer.

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Addendum:

That method doesn't seem to be able to download the original language version.
You could try this tool instead (I haven't tried it):
https://jdownloader.org/

I should also probably add that I suspect both methods only work if you are in Germany.

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Addendum 2:
Tried it. No luck with the JDownloader and the original language version.

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Addendum 3:
The browser plugin Video DownloadHelper does the trick.
https://www.downloadhelper.net/

Nothing left to do wrote: ↑Mon Feb 03, 2025 6:39 pm I used Mediathekviewveb to download the German language version and everything worked perfectly.

hydriot wrote: ↑Sun Feb 02, 2025 9:18 pm
The island is the real star of the film. Generally, I am rather critical of films made on Hydra but the makers of this one have made a big effort to be accurate.

But do bear in mind that the views of Hydra are sanitised. In the sixties there was a great deal of poverty on the island. Gardens were very basic and not as lush as depicted in the film. I remember ragged children dragging lumps of ice to a home without electricity, teenagers with limbs deformed by malnutrition, and very few tavernas. Katsikas was a grocery store with a snug at the back: where everyone caroused was in a taverna a few doors along whose name I cannot remember (in Leonard's book of sheet music, there is a photo of him, Marianne, Chuck and Gorden carousing there).

But I did very much like the touches of authenticity: for example, Marianne bringing wicker flasks of cheap Kampas wine up the street (not water as the film implies). And the fact that the fim-crew got permission to use the real 'Australia House' where the Johnstons lived.

If you want to know more about the late fifties and early sixties on the island, do read Peel Me a Lotus.

hydriot wrote: ↑Sun Feb 02, 2025 9:18 pm If you want to know more about the late fifties and early sixties on the island, do read Peel Me a Lotus.

Jordi Bossoms wrote:…And in 1960 a twenty-six-year-old poet disembarked there, who had published a couple of books and who had been working on his first novel in a boarding house in Hampstead, London, thanks to a grant of two thousand dollars that the Canada Council for the Arts had granted him. His name was Leonard Cohen, and he was telling everyone that, sick of London's rainy April, he had gone into the Bank of Greece and asked the first Greek he met there what the weather was like in his country. But this was not entirely true. Leonard had met Barbara Rothschild at a party, and discovered she was about to marry the Greek artist Nikos Ghika, who owned a forty-room mansion on the sunny island of Hydra, where writers such as Lawrence Durrell, Henry Miller, Cyril Connolly and Patrick Leigh Fermor had stayed. He thought, of course, that he could stay there too. So two weeks later he set foot in Hydra for the first time. At the harbor, as George and Charmian watched him sitting on a terrace, he asked for directions to the Ghika mansion. He climbed steps and more steps to get there. He knocked on the door and made the mistake of dropping Rothschild's name into the ears of a Greek landlady faithful to the painter's first wife. "You better go" she told him. “We don't need any more Jews here." And young Leonard went down to the harbor again, desolated, not without first cursing the mansion, which, by chance or not, burned to ashes not long after.

As it could not be otherwise, it was George and Charmian who hosted the Canadian poet. They let him sleep in his study, and put a table and a chair for him on the terrace, where he spent the hours writing in the sun. They corrected his manuscripts and they looked for him a house on the island, the purchase of which, as he would later claim, was the best decision of his life. They also introduced Marianne, who had just had a child with Axel, but from whom she was already separating, because he was planning to run away to America with his new lover, the painter Patricia Amlin. And they even organized his first concert for him, after encouraging him to sing his own songs. Leonard's gratitude to George and Charmian was always immense. "Their mythical quality went beyond life", he said of them in an interview with the Australian journalist Marie Knuckey. “They drank and wrote more than anyone else, got sick and healed more than anyone else, cursed and blessed more than anyone else, and were by far the most supportive. They were a source of inspiration.” And in 1980, when starting his first concert in Sydney, he said that «this concert is for George Johnston and Charmian Clift, who taught me to write”. …