Leonard Cohen (2021)

Five years after the death of modern troubadour Leonard Cohen, director Daniel Askill is out with a haunting video for “Puppets,” off Cohen’s 2019 posthumous album, Thanks for the Dance.

Shot in black and white, the video follows a lonely figure kitted out like Cohen — played by actor Bobbi Salvör Menuez — as they fall to their knees in the New York City streets, self-immolating as loose papers litter the cobblestones.

“Cohen has an incredible ability to create a bridge between the sublime and the prosaic — the metaphysical and political. In ‘Puppets,’ he does that while addressing dark themes with a poetic insight. This video for ‘Puppets’ has been born out of a wonderful ongoing dialogue with [his son] Adam Cohen. … This film follows the symbolic journey of a single figure through darkness toward a transcendence. In many ways, it is visually pointing to the idea that Leonard often beautifully evokes in different ways — that the darkness and the light of our experience is deeply entangled — and maybe at a fundamental level they are in fact one and the same.”

Daniel Askill