Patti Smith: Dream of Life

The music of Patti Smith slaps you in the side with its energy, temerity, and fearlessness. Its raw intensity of uncharted punk, the incantatory ritual poesy of her lyrics, and Smith's lone wolf, damning presence remindful of mid-'60s Dylan all fuse into an atom bomb explosion of incendiary rock and transcendent poetry, a true icon of rock, or, as Smith ruefully remarks in Steven Sebring's reverent profile, Patti Smith: Dream of Life, "How does it palpate to be a rock icon? I always think of Mount Rushmore."


Sebring fatigued 11 years filming Smith, from her Gone Again comeback record album after going away music behind to raise a family (husband Fred Sonic Smith and iI children Jackson and Jesse) in a home in Detroit up to a few days ago, where she is seen hot against the criminal acts of the Apostles of George W. Bush. The center point of the cinema is a cluttered room filled with memorabilia from Smith's living, the way getting more than and more cluttered with detritus (like the address of Bringing It All Back Home) as the years and the cinema wear on and she comments on her lifetime and times.


Sebring impressionistically mixes footage of that room with snippets of concerts, travels to cities around the globe, and visits with friends and crime syndicate, all shot in granular 16mm colouration and pitch-black and white, Sebring cut with a swath betwixt both. Like Bruce Weber, Sebring is a fashion photographer, his film carriage hints of Weber's Chet Baker homage Let's Get Lost just with Sebring also photographing Smith in the cryptic and symbolic style of Maya Deren's Meshes in the Afternoon, making the film a well-shot hallucinatory hagiographa.


During one of the cuts to Smith in concert, she sings, "I was free/needed nobody/it was beautiful/it was beautiful" zeroing in on all the limitations Sebring brings to his film. In the press notes, Sebring says that he was unfamiliar with Smith's music and that he came up with the idea for the take during an assigned photograph shoot with Smith. In Patti Smith: Dream of Life, he also of necessity nobody as he trains his photographic camera on Smith to the exclusion of anything else -- her art, her culture, her significance. What we see of Smith in Sebring's film is more like a schizophrenic case study -- offstage, a warm, kind woman from South Jersey world Health Organization loves her family and waxes nostalgic over a dress she wore as a kid to a feral, hot wire jingle of nerves, spew, and unfettered furiousness onstage.


Sebring cuts between the two Smiths with incoherent smacks. She is in New Jersey visiting her parents ("Do you still feed the squirrels, Daddy?" she asks he beginner) and bonding with her kids ("Mommy? I love you, Mommy." "I sexual love you, Jesse."), or Smith is peal around on tombstones throughout the