Patti Smith: Dream of Life~ Punk Legend as Muse

A Legend as Muse: Patti Smith Fills Role

LOS ANGELES — There was a time, a decade ago, Patti Smith said, that she did not want to make a film about herself.

“To me the idea seems sort of conceited,” she said in an interview. “I felt, even though I was 50 years old at the time, too young to do a documentary. I hadn’t done enough work yet to merit a documentary.”

It turns out that being followed around by a camera for more than a decade can help one overcome shyness. On Dec. 30, Ms. Smith’s 63rd birthday, PBS will broadcast “Patti Smith: Dream of Life,” a documentary filmed over 11 years by the fashion photographer and film neophyte Steven Sebring.

The broadcast, part of the PBS series “POV,” is but the first step in what appears to be an all-out blitz to erase any remaining notions that Ms. Smith has not done enough work yet. “Dream of Life” has already been screened at some 30 film festivals around the world, including the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, where it won an award for cinematography. The PBS broadcast will coincide with three nights of musical performances by Ms. Smith at the Bowery Ballroom in New York, to be followed in 2010 by performances in Detroit, Chicago and London.

A related art exhibition, “Objects of Life,” will open on Jan. 6 at the Robert Miller Gallery in New York. And beginning Jan. 19, Ms. Smith will visit bookstores around the country in support of “Just Kids,” an autobiographical account of her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, her close friend and fellow inhabitant of the Chelsea Hotel in New York in the late 1960s and ’70s.

Patti Smith burst onto the cultural landscape in the early 1970s with poetry readings in Lower Manhattan and several-times-a-week musical performances at a new downtown club called CBGB. Her 1975 debut album, “Horses,” is now viewed as a rock ’n’ roll classic.

According to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, where she was inducted in 2007, the album is anchored by “vivid, disturbing imagery that poured from Smith in impassioned torrents.” It arrived, according to the museum, “at a time when rock ’n roll needed a jolt from its unadventurous rut and upwardly mobile arena-rock pretensions.”

“Dream of Life” provides glimpses into that creative prime of her life, via archival footage and film of recent performances captured by Mr. Sebring.

“I haven’t changed all that much as a performer,” Ms. Smith said. “I still have the same visions, and I still like to make a lot of noise and a lot of loud feedback on my guitar.”

But the film also delves much deeper. It begins with her goodbye to the house in Detroit where, in a retreat from fame into a new role as a mother, she lived for 16 years beginning in the early 1980s. From there the film documents Ms. Smith’s return to New York and to performing a decade ago, after a trio of unexpected deaths that affected her deeply — of her husband, the guitarist Fred Smith; of her brother, Todd; and of her longtime pianist, Richard Sohl.

“I had to leave Detroit,” Ms. Smith said in the interview, which took place in August, when PBS was promoting the film to television journalists. “I don’t drive, and I didn’t want to live in Detroit alone, and so I brought my children back to the East Coast.”

“But I had to get a job, to take care of them, and to send them to school,” she added. “You know it’s a lot more expensive to live in New York City than in Detroit. And so I went back to performing.”

She was encouraged by a few close friends: Bob Dylan, who drafted Ms. Smith to tour on the East Coast with him in 1995, and Allen Ginsberg and Michael Stipe, the R.E.M. frontman.

Those men are present, at least spiritually, in the film, as is Sam Shepard, who drops by her apartment for a tranquil jam session. But as the film critic Manohla Dargis wrote in reviewing “Dream of Life” in The New York Times in 2008, “If you want to know about punk, what it was like to play CBGB when it mattered (or on its final night, as Ms. Smith did in 2006), look elsewhere.” What the film presents is instead a dreamy atmosphere that, as Ms. Dargis wrote, “feels less like a documentary and more like an act of rapturous devotion.”

Mr. Sebring, who sat with Ms. Smith during the interview, said he basically made up his vision for the film as he went along.

“I’m not a historian, you know,” he said. “I didn’t have any set plan what it was going to be. As soon as we started cutting it, I knew it wasn’t going to be a typical documentary.”

He filmed performances and tours in Israel and Japan and Washington. And as he was editing the film, he set up a 16-millimeter camera in her bedroom to capture Ms. Smith telling stories about herself and her life.

“We were always in her bedroom,” Mr. Sebring said, “because that’s where she thinks, that’s where she creates, where she could show things and talk about them.”

Those scenes provide the film’s faint narrative, revealing a person who to many people under 40 is little more than a name or a stock character — “the godmother of punk,” as she is often called.

“My main hope for the film is that people see the work that Steven does, and that Steven is appreciated for the work,” Ms. Smith said. “My own personal hope is just that people get some sense that I have more dimensions than is sometimes reported. Sometimes all people know about you is, No. 1, your work, but through the media they often will be given one aspect of a human being.”

“I’m happy for people to get a more humanistic view,” she said. “I have a really great life. I’ve had, for me, really great tragedy in my life. I still mourn my people that I lost. I miss my husband. But I’ve had great opportunities in my life.”