Patti Smith gave the music world a jolt when she first appeared in the mid-70s, writing lyrics through a Rimbaud/Blake/Whitman conception of visionary poetry, hanging out with art world figures and in performance attempting to create a shamanistic intensity. Bob Dylan had blazed much of this path but he was cryptic and contradictory, both more serious and less grandiose. Smith often came off as a bright undergraduate, except when it came to her music which remained true to her original ideas even when she was flirting with mass audiences. Thirty-plus years down the road Smith has mellowed a bit--we're unlikely to hear the cacophony of another "Radio Ethiopia"--but she's far from irrelevant.
Along the way, Smith frequently proclaimed her ambivalence towards rock music though she's remained more dedicated to it in practice than many peers of that time such as David Byrne, Elvis Costello or Tom Verlaine. The new documentary Patti Smith: Dream of Life (Palm Pictures) similarly takes its own path. Most music documentaries--when they aren't simple concert recordings--are primarily promotional pieces, frequently straight biographies or sometimes arguments for re-evaluations. Lately we've seen numerous ones that focus on obscure or marginalized figures such as Scott Walker or Daniel Johnston. Dream of Life avoids such familiar approaches by attempting to create a more personal portrait - in fact it avoids the standards of music documentary so often that the film may not mean much to non-fans. It's not an argument for her place in the canon or an invitation to learn about her music but more like a visit for tea with digressive chat.
As it opens we see grainy images of roads and working class America with Smith's voice-over musing on her place in this world before giving a brief synopsis of her life up to her first album. It's typical of the film's approach that this overview doesn't distinguish between her first single and her first album and though in one sense it doesn't matter (art is art no matter the size) in another sense this factual slippage makes it harder to get a grasp on what exactly Smith has done. Once Smith reaches New York City after a few minutes of this, the rest of the film ignores chronology. We might hear her reminiscences of William Burroughs in the 70s, then about the deaths of her husband and brother in the 90s, see concert clips from recent years, catch a story about meeting Bob Dylan or Allen Ginsberg or detour through the halcyon years of the landmark club CBGBs. It's an impressionist structure that's not even trying to create a career overview, which explains why there are such long sequences showing her painting or visiting her parents. Viewers are shown Patti Smith the person, not Patti Smith the musician.
In fact music is ever present but mostly sidelined. Smith talks about her guitar, a present from playwright Sam Shepard (later in the film the two perform together), and then how she learned to play Dylan songs. The concert clips are rarely full songs and mostly not her most famous work. It's almost like the music is her day job and she doesn't want to bore us with the details. Perhaps because Smith considers herself a poet rather than a rock and roller though anybody who's read her books knows that's she's an indifferent poet at best. But song lyrics aren't poetry, they work to different needs and to different purposes, and in her songs Smith knows exactly where she's going and how to achieve the effects she wants.
Dream of Life employs, for the most part, the usual music doc mix of archival footage, home movies, modern interviews and follow-the-subject verite stalking but re-thought in a more open-ended manner. Interviews with Smith, for instance, aren't the usual talking head format but might be her sitting in a spare room talking about a dress from when she was a small girl or in a hot dog stand remembering how Robert Mapplethorpe liked to eat there. A good bit of the recent footage is so grainy that it might as well be three decades old - having no dates or identifying labels pushes the film almost into an eternal "now" no matter how much of it is about the past. (Dream of Life won the cinematography award at Sundance in 2008.)
It would be interesting to find out how much influence Smith had on the film's approach because while credited to photographer and first-time director Steven Sebring it feels almost like Smith made her own elaborate visual scrapbook. Otherwise why would an outsider focus on where her parents acquired their dog or how she tours with her children. While it's nice to know that she's at least in touch with her parents and appears to be a good parent herself we could say the same of millions of people though none of them wrote "Dancing Barefoot" or "Frederick" or "People Have the Power." Smith the musician is why we're watching but that's an aspect that she seems determined to obscure to some degree. The earlier comparison to Rimbaud, Blake and Whitman wasn't critical insight but something that Smith explicitly mentions in the film, even going so far as to visit the graves of the first two (she climbs on top of Rimbaud's). Knowing those names probably doesn't have much bearing on how you hear Smith's music, influence-spotting having always been the least productive type of commentary. But it doesn't hurt. In the end that may be the entire point of Patti Smith: Dream of Life - the music will always be there and Smith isn't changing it now so just spend a little time with her and see where you go.
For more information about Patti Smith: Dream of Life, visit Palm Pictures. To order Patti Smith: Dream of Life, go to TCM Shopping.
by Lang Thompson
