User:Geo Swan/Kari Hesthamar

Kari Hesthamar is an award winning Norwegian journalist and film-maker, best known in the anglosphere for documenting the life of Marianne Ihlen, singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen's first muse, who went on to have a rich life of her own. Hesthamar wrote and directed a documentary on Ihlen in 2006. It was one of her award winning works. In 2008 Hesthamar wrote her own biography of Ihlen, "So Long, Marianne: A Love Story", which was translated into English in 2014.

In 2014, in a review of Lana Del Rey's sophomore album, "Ultraviolence", Alexandra Molotkow, who had just read the recently released English translation of Hesthamar's book on Ihlen, compared Del Rey's persona of surrender to Ihlen's search for independence. Molotkow described Del Rey as an artist, fully in control of her career, who, paradoxically, had chosen a performing persona as a weak and helpless female, who sought to surrender to powerful men. According to Molotkow, even though Ihlen had the reality of the fantasy Del Rey shows in her videos, of the woman socially and economically reliant on a man, Ihlen became fully independent. According to Molotkow, Hesthamar's book is:
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 * "... the story of a remarkable woman who was a muse – who has, until now, appeared in history as a man’s idea – and how she found herself. Often, the book reads as a caution against giving up your power."
 * "... the story of a remarkable woman who was a muse – who has, until now, appeared in history as a man’s idea – and how she found herself. Often, the book reads as a caution against giving up your power."


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