Last night I went to see a documentary about the amazing Patti Smith. Now I thought this was going to be as amazing as she is, and in some ways it was, but I had so much to say afterwards, hence the ramble to come.
So some background behind this film, it was made by Steven Sebring who is a fashion photographer and he spent 11 years filming Patti Smith for the film. Now I find that films made by photographers or artists, people who are generally more visual artists, the films come out absolutely beautiful (for example, my favourite film this year Hunger). And this film was beautiful, some of the sequences looked like they could be put in a modern art museum as video art. However it seemed like the real point to the film was lost in the concentration of beautiful shots. It just seemed to go from one thing to the next with no explanation and no coherent thread. I kind of assumed that he wanted to give a “snapshot” impression of her but it was too all over the place. I felt like a lot of it would have been the director going “Hey so I have this great idea, do this crazy stuff and talk about your childhood at the same time and it will be awesome!” and sometimes it was but sometimes it just came out a little pretentious. There was a lot of talk of poets and artists and all that which I found a little alienating. Its like when someone really intellectual talks to you and you obviously have never read or heard of anything they’re talking about but they still talk about it. But it did make me want to read more, and read more challenging material.
Anyway, I still really liked it and it made me like Patti Smith even more. I would really like to be friends with her, she seems to radiate something that makes everyone around her feel comfortable. I am not a massive Patti Smith fan but I was constantly intrigued by hre throughout the whole film. So despite my problems with some of the technical choices, I don’t think you could go wrong with a subject like that.
