So Long Marianne TV series filmed on Hydra

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B4real
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Re: So Long Marianne TV series filmed on Hydra

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Andrew (Darby) wrote: Sat Oct 19, 2024 5:14 pm Like Henning and Hydriot, I now plan to binge watch the remaining episodes during the week. ;-)
Well, Andrew I watched the first episode last night on normal SBS TV and I’ve just done that and binge-watched the remaining 7 episodes on SBS On Demand but end-on-end! I hadn’t intended to do so but I wanted to know slowly how they configured the ending, ha!

You know this thread began in in March 2023 as “Casting Call” and I have to say that all the cast of this show were cast very close to the original people. The show says, “inspired by true stories” and it would appear they were indeed inspired!

Not a bad way to spend a Sunday.
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Re: So Long Marianne TV series filmed on Hydra

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Really enjoying the series .. great acting and seems to capture the spirit of the time. I do have one issue which I suspect forum members can resolve .. in the first four episodes, set in the early 1960s, Leonard is featured singing several songs that, of course, were not released until several years later … Hey that’s no way to say goodbye, The stranger song, Sisters of Mercy and snippets of Winter Lady. Is there any evidence that these were already songs he had written and composed in the early Hydra years or is this poetic licence? Of course, they work wonderfully in the series so I am not complaining! Thanks!
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Henning
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Re: So Long Marianne TV series filmed on Hydra

Post by Henning »

Hi Paul - I think they were juggling with the correct timing a bit to the effect that it fits better to the story.

Maybe someone can explain why they stayed in Oslo and were even thinking of getting Leonard a job there when the original traveling plan was to bring the car to Norway for tax reasons.
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sebmelmoth2003
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Re: So Long Marianne TV series filmed on Hydra

Post by sebmelmoth2003 »

interview with writer/director - 45 minutes approx into programme :

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00246cr
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Re: So Long Marianne TV series filmed on Hydra

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sebmelmoth2003 wrote: Mon Oct 21, 2024 12:34 pm interview with writer/director - 45 minutes approx into programme :

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00246cr
An interesting interview, but I do wish people would stop calling the island High-dra, as if it were a multi-headed serpent.
“If you do have love it's a kind of wound, and if you don't have it it's worse.” - Leonard, July 1988
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Re: So Long Marianne TV series filmed on Hydra

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Paul Zagreb wrote: Sun Oct 20, 2024 4:15 pm Really enjoying the series .. great acting and seems to capture the spirit of the time. I do have one issue which I suspect forum members can resolve .. in the first four episodes, set in the early 1960s, Leonard is featured singing several songs that, of course, were not released until several years later … Hey that’s no way to say goodbye, The stranger song, Sisters of Mercy and snippets of Winter Lady. Is there any evidence that these were already songs he had written and composed in the early Hydra years or is this poetic licence? Of course, they work wonderfully in the series so I am not complaining! Thanks!
Artistic license. Sisters of Mercy was of course written about a couple of girls he befriended in a doorway one freezing evening in Edmonton. Nothing to do with Hydra or Marianne at all.
“If you do have love it's a kind of wound, and if you don't have it it's worse.” - Leonard, July 1988
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Re: So Long Marianne TV series filmed on Hydra

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I completed watching the series a week ago. I thought it was much better than I expected; the producers made a real effort to be accurate.

One thing I would like members' comments on: in the final quarter, it was very strongly suggested that it was Leonard who was hostile to the idea of fathering a child with Marianne. Yet I recall towards the end of her life, Marianne regretted not giving Leonard a child, saying that she was nervous about taking on the responsibility for a second one. Her regret was crystallised when Suzanne Elrod turned up to evict her with Adam in her arms. Comments?

The other point to make is that what the film failed to get across was the grinding poverty on Hydra in the sixties. I arrived Easter 1965 and was immmediately struck by the malnourished youths with deformed limbs, and the little boys in rags dragging blocks of ice up the hill on the end of a leash.

Dem once asked me if Hydra today is better or worse than in the sixties. I replied "worse for the foreigners, better for the locals".
“If you do have love it's a kind of wound, and if you don't have it it's worse.” - Leonard, July 1988
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Re: So Long Marianne TV series filmed on Hydra

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https://insidestory.org.au/the-affair-t ... -happened/

The affair that never happened

TV’s So Long Marianne ventures into an ethical minefield

Paul Genoni & Tanya Dalziell Television 11 November 2024
Should anyone care whether Charmian Clift and Leonard Cohen had an affair on a Greek island more than sixty years ago? Why, in 2024, might we be concerned if two adults with well-recorded histories of infidelity and casual sex got it together at a time and place when — as a headline in the London Telegraph recently declared — “everyone was shagging everyone”?
After all, the year in question was 1960, and the world was on the cusp of a decade whose radical appeal to “free love” overturned postwar social conservatism. It was a decade to which Clift and Cohen both made liberating contributions, and it might be deemed right that they should have marked its onset with a scene-setting dalliance.
An account of this supposed affair has been aired as part of an eight-part series, So Long Marianne, currently screening on SBS. It was the series’ co-creator, co-writer and director Øystein Karlsen who provided the Telegraph with the “everyone was shagging everyone” line. The Canadian–Norwegian production focuses on the sixties-spanning relationship between Cohen and his muse Marianne Ihlen, which started on the island of Hydra in mid 1960 and was all but exhausted by decade’s end.
The story of that relationship — shifting between Hydra, Oslo, Montreal and New York — is told in parallel with that of Hydra’s older Australian couple, writers Clift and her husband George Johnston. By the time Cohen arrived on the island, Clift and Johnston had been there for five years, revelling in their role at the centre of a proto-hippie community of bohemian expats and visitors. The couple’s own sixties experience would end miserably, with Clift’s suicide in Sydney in 1969 and Johnston’s death the following year.
The first episode of So Long Marianne follows Cohen as he travels from London to Hydra seeking sunshine and a creative spark. He immediately meets Clift who invites him, in true sixties style, to stay in the house she and Johnston share with their three young children. By episode’s end, as Cohen recites “Beneath My Hands,” his early erotic poem of tender love, the two of them have fallen into each other’s arms.
The relationship, conducted in the Clift–Johnston house and with George’s tubercular cough echoing from the floor above, continues into the second episode. After what is described as “six months” they drift apart, Cohen distracted by the alluring and younger Ihlen and Clift acknowledging the liaison as one more in a line of island romances for which she will never forsake George.
While this made-in-bohemian-heaven affair set in a bucolic off-grid paradise, might have been an irresistible cinematic temptation, there is absolutely no evidence that it happened.
Many of the participants and their friends left behind diaries, letters, memoirs and autofiction describing a claustrophobically intimate community where the rumours were hot before the sheets were cold. Even in this febrile environment, no member of the expat circle has even hinted at a sexual relationship between Clift and Cohen. Nor have any of a welter of retrospectively researched and written biographies of Cohen, Clift, Johnston, Ihlen and others associated with the Hydra expats. Despite biographers’ keen eyes for personal entanglements, none has suggested that Clift and Cohen enjoyed anything more than a platonic friendship.
The writers of So Long Marianne call at key points on a book that shares the same title. This is a 2014 biography of Marianne Ihlen on which Ihlen herself collaborated with Norwegian author Kari Hesthamar. That account makes clear that Ihlen and Clift enjoyed a close friendship both before and after Cohen arrived on Hydra. Given that Ihlen was fully aware of Clift’s and Cohen’s sexual adventurism — a trait she herself shared — there is no plausible reason for her to be coy about revealing such a relationship between two people with whom she was intimately associated. But she doesn’t.

In the absence of any evidence that such an affair took place, it is only reasonable to conclude that it didn’t. Which brings us back to the question of whether we should care? Well “we’” (the authors of this article) do care, as we have taken time over a number of years to learn as much as possible about the lives of the Hydra expats. It’s important to us that the stories we share on the subject are accurate and verifiable. We also assume that those who read what we (and others) have written on the subject also care for accuracy.
But should casual consumers of a series like So Long Marianne care too? Life-writing — in numerous forms and in various mediums — has become a dominant form of information and entertainment. Creators and audiences are sufficiently sophisticated to agree that the representation of complex lives often requires manipulation of the literal truth. Many of these manipulations — modified timeframes, condensed locations and incidents, resequenced events, conflated characters, fabricated dialogue — are anticipated and accepted. As well as being justified by the need for concision, these devices enable a narrative to look beyond the skin of representative individuals and examine how they connect to wider narratives of time and place. So it is no surprise to see them on display in So Long Marianne. Ihlen is depicted as pregnant when she and Cohen first encounter each other, for example, whereas the child had been born three months prior to the earliest date at which they could have met.
When film-makers elect to use these imaginative narrative devices it only sharpens the need for a careful approach to the ethical issues that arise in representing a life. In her recent book Artful Truths, philosopher Helena de Bras provides a thorough and lucid account of the many ethical challenges faced when writing memoir — challenges that can be comfortably extrapolated to other forms of life-writing. While de Bras takes a liberal view of what departures from the literal truth are ethically permissible in order to produce art, she draws a line at the “lie,” for which she provides a straightforward definition: “a statement believed to be false with the intention of getting another to believe it to be true.” There can be little doubt that in a series following the basic facts of a widely recounted “true story” and featuring characters identified as Charmian Clift and Leonard Cohen, viewers will assume their sexual relationship to be “true.”
The ethical problems resulting from lies are considerable and frequently harmful, and the more personal a lie the greater the potential for harm. Clearly, few aspects of a life are more personal than sexually intimate relationships and the conditions under which they are conducted. Film-makers are wading into ethical quicksand when they invent intimate relationships between “real” characters.
If similar unproven claims were made about living characters they would provide grounds for legal action. But even if the nature and manner of a “lie” fails to meet the tests required for legal redress, it remains ethically unjustifiable because (as de Bras also points out) the ethical obligations owed to life-writing subjects are considerably more demanding than the standards required by law.
Our concern here is with Clift in particular. Since her death there has been a struggle to exhume her reputation as one of Australia’s finest literary stylists of the twentieth century from beneath the lasting attention given to two biographical details: her oft-cited affairs on Hydra and her suicide.
They are not unconnected. It is often suggested that a provocation that led Clift to take her own life was the imminent publication of Johnston’s autobiographical novel Clean Straw for Nothing. Clift was aware this book about their expatriate years would reveal her infidelities at a time when she had spent five years rebuilding her reputation in Australia with a groundbreaking weekly column for the Sydney Morning Herald and the Melbourne Herald.
Six decades later, when Clift’s true affairs have lost the capacity to shock or directly damage her, she will again face scrutiny because of infidelity. Ironically, this time it will be for an affair that didn’t happen, exacerbated by the fact that it purportedly involved a man who became one of the most widely known public figures of his generation. It is indicative that the London Telegraph article also reported that So Long Marianne describes how “Cohen was taken under the wing and into the bed of Clift,” thereby repeating the gratuitous and even cynical invention. The lie will go on being repeated, deflecting attention from what was most important to Clift — her achievements as a writer.

So yes, we should care about the misleading portrayal of Clift and Cohen’s relationship in So Long Marianne, not just for Clift’s and Cohen’s sake, but also for the sake of audience members concerned with ethically responsible life writing. •
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Re: So Long Marianne TV series filmed on Hydra

Post by LisaLCFan »

B4real wrote: Tue Nov 12, 2024 12:42 am ...The affair that never happened...
Interesting article. I haven't yet decided if I should care (as the authors implore us to do), that a TV miniseries depicts a possibly fictional sexual relationship between Cohen and Clift, but I have to admit that I am leaning towards not caring. I suppose that it might depend on whether or not this miniseries is being presented as a factual account of Cohen's life (and of the lives of those around him), or simply a fictional series based on real lives (and thus, a combination of fact and fiction). It wouldn't be the first "biographical" film to include a considerable bit of fiction, particularly of a sensationalistic sort. Caveat emptor, I should think.

Nonetheless, I suppose it might be interesting if the filmmakers were asked to explain their decision to depict an affair between Cohen and Clift, to see what reason they can provide as to this apparent transgression from the truth, if that is what it is -- just because nobody wrote about it doesn't mean that it didn't happen! Mind you, if Cohen and Clift were nothing more than Platonic friends, as the authors insist, then it was probably because Clift was too old, and Leonard liked them young (and pretty) -- had Clift been 15 years younger, is there any doubt that they'd have hooked up?
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Re: So Long Marianne TV series filmed on Hydra

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LisaLCFan wrote: Tue Nov 12, 2024 2:00 am
B4real wrote: Tue Nov 12, 2024 12:42 am ...The affair that never happened...
Or did it? Further to the above posts, the authors of the article in question suggest that there is no evidence that Leonard Cohen ever had an intimate relationship with Charmian Clift. However, there is Cohen's poem entitled "Half the Perfect World," to which Anjani added music and recorded as a song on her Blue Alert album, which I have quoted below.

I think that it is arguably clear that the poem takes place in Hydra, and that the "she" in the first stanza could easily describe Charmian Clift circa 1960 (in her thirties, had made some money, lived with men, etc.). Perhaps that is the "evidence" that the authors believe to be lacking, and it could be the origin of the filmmakers' choice to include the Cohen-Clift affair in their miniseries. Of course, we may not know if Cohen was writing about his first year in Hydra, or if the thirty-something woman was a real person he knew (and slept with), but it is possible (and perhaps even plausible! Maybe the occasional older woman appealed to him!). Incidentally, if someone thinks that the "she" in the poem might be Marianne, bear in mind that Marianne was only 25 years old when Leonard met her in Hydra in 1960.

Half the Perfect World

Every night she'd come to me
I'd cook for her, I'd pour her tea
She was in her thirties then
Had made some money, lived with men

We'd lay us down to give and get
Beneath the white mosquito net
And since no counting had begun
We lived a thousand years in one

The candles burned
The moon went down
The polished hill
The milky town
Transparent, weightless, luminous
Uncovering the two of us
On that fundamental ground
Where love's unwilled, unleashed
Unbound
And half the perfect world is found
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Re: So Long Marianne TV series filmed on Hydra

Post by hydriot »

The answer may lie within the pages of Clean Straw for Nothing. Some have suggested that Clift's suicide on the eve of publication of this autobiographical novel by her husband was provoked by its thinly-disguised description of her many infidelities. Personally, I don't believe that would have been sufficient to provoke suicide, given that Clift throughout her life was wonderfully indifferent to public opinion. But still it would be interesting to know if someone fitting Leonard's description appears in those pages.

I have not read anything by George Johnston and unfortunately his books, if available at all, are extremely expensive. Has anyone here read the trilogy?
“If you do have love it's a kind of wound, and if you don't have it it's worse.” - Leonard, July 1988
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Re: So Long Marianne TV series filmed on Hydra

Post by B4real »

Lisa,
Some interesting thoughts you have there about the article and your expansion of it.

That song, “Half the Perfect World”, which Anjani sang was firstly a poem Leonard called “Half The World” in his Book of Longing poetry book; one of writing about time and place and people. Both her album and his book were released/ published in 2006. If I recall correctly from ‘somewhere’, the lines of Half the (Perfect) World were about Hydra but I don’t know about whom.

EDIT: Lisa, you reminded me about that song and I've now listened to “Blue Alert in Warsaw”.
Just after Anjani sings Half the Perfect World she says:
“Leonard wrote that when he was living on Hydra. Can’t you tell, it’s so tropical, so hot!”
Yes, that’s the ‘somewhere’ I recall it from 😉

~~~~~

Hydroit,
I had to read My Brother Jack, the first book in the Meredith trilogy, whether I liked it or not! It was assigned compulsory reading in Australia when I went back to college to extend my education many years ago. The second book in the trilogy, Clean Straw For Nothing was optional reading then and I did read it as well. Unfortunately, I can’t recall it clearly (too long ago!) so no answer from me for you there. But it seems I should have kept those books as they have increased so much in value, ha!

I haven’t read the third book in the trilogy, A Cartload of Clay. Actually, thinking about George’s character, David Meredith in those three novels, versions of him were firstly featured in two earlier ones, The Far Road and Closer To The Sun. I haven’t read those either but maybe there could be a clue to what you say in them.
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Re: So Long Marianne TV series filmed on Hydra

Post by LisaLCFan »

B4real wrote: Wed Nov 13, 2024 6:43 am ...That song, “Half the Perfect World”, which Anjani sang was firstly a poem Leonard called “Half The World” in his Book of Longing poetry book...
Thank you! I was looking for that reference, not recalling for certain whether or not it was published by Leonard as a poem, but I wasn't able to locate it. Cheers!
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