"Dream of Life is a plunge into the philosophy and artistry of cult rocker Patti Smith. This portrait of the legendary singer, artist and poet explores themes of spirituality, history and self expression. Known as the godmother of punk, she emerged in the Seventies, galvanizing the music scene with her unique style of poetic rage, music and trademark swagger. We follow this multitalented and private artist over eleven years of international travel, through her spoken words, performances, lyrics, interviews, paintings, and photographs. Steven Sebrings portrait Dream of Life reveals a complicated, charismatic personality. Patti Smith who narrates the film, wrestles with life’s many paradoxes. She defines the human experience as an overwhelming contradiction. Then she pulls the strings of her guitar and simply makes music.

No person is just one thing. I know I am not just a fashion photographer. And Patti Smith is certainly not just a rock icon. She is much more. For me, this movie is about discovering who Patti Smith is. This process of discovery has been over the course of eleven incredible years of filming. I can’t believe it, but a quarter of my life has been spent framing her in my lens. And through this film, I want to channel that experience to the audience. (Steven Sebring)

STEVEN SEBRING
Steven Sebring was born in 1966 in Aberdeen, South Dakota. He moved to New York in 1992, and has become known for his definitive style of photography in fashion, celebrity, and rock-n-roll portraiture. When he is not busy with exhibitions, book publishing, and film making, he continues to shoot portraiture, beauty and fashion.

The movie "Patti Smith: Dream of Life" will be shown during the Viennale at the 21th October 2008 (9 pm in the Künstlerhaus) and at the 24th October 2008 (12 pm in the Gartenbaukino). For further information please see the fact sheet (PDF, 0,3 MB).

The organizing committee of the Viennale has dedicated the movie "Patti Smith: Dream of Life" to The Ring, Vienna´s Casual Luxury Hotel.

"Vor elf Jahren besuchte der Fotograf Steven Sebring sein erstes Patti-Smith-Konzert. Ihr Auftritt beeindruckte ihn so sehr, dass er die Rocksängerin bat, sie fotografieren und filmen zu dürfen. Aus dem, was anfangs durchaus experimentellen Charakter besaß – Sebring verfügte zu diesem Zeitpunkt über keinerlei professionelle Filmerfahrung –, entwickelte sich eine filmische Langzeitbeobachtung und ein sehr persönliches Biopic, dessen Aufnahmen Patti Smith selbst kommentiert.

In Interviewsequenzen, Off-Kommentaren, Liedtexten und Anekdoten erzählt Patti Smith, was sie für wichtig hält, nennt Freunde, Inspirationen und Lebensstrategien beim Namen. Hier erscheinen die frühen Lektüren von William Blake, Edgar Allen Poe und Rimbaud sowie die privaten wie kreativen Freundschaften zu William S. Burroughs oder Allen Ginsberg fast wichtiger als die wiederholten Begegnungen mit Musikerkollegen wie Bob Dylan. Hierin steckt eine der Überraschungen dieses Porträts: Patti Smith präsentiert sich stärker als Dichterin, Beat-Literatin, Punk-Philosophin und politisch Engagierte denn als Rockstar auf der Bühne. Singen ist für sie nur eine Möglichkeit unter vielen, ihre Stimme einzusetzen. (Sarah Sander)

STEVEN SEBRING
Geboren 1966 in Aberdeen, South Dakota. Aufgewachsen in Arizona, wo er auch sein erstes Fotostudio eröffnet. Wird als Porträt-, Mode und Starfotograf berühmt. Lebt seit 1992 in New York. Arbeitet für zahlreiche Magazine und Designer. Dreht mit New York Stories (2003) und Road Stories (2004) zwei Kurzfilme und veröffentlicht 2005 das Fotobuch 'Bygone Days'."

Der Film "Patti Smith: Dream of Life" wird im Rahmen der Viennale am 21.10.2008 (21:00 im Künstlerhaus) und am 24.10.2008 (24:00 Gartenbaukino) ausgestrahlt. Alle Infos zum Film als PDF (0,3 MB).

Das Organisationskommitee der Viennale hat den Film "Patti Smith: Dream of Life" The Ring Hotel, Vienna´s Casual Luxury Hotel, gewidmet.

Dream of Life is a new documentary about Patti Smith directed by photographer Steven Sebring. Dream has already won an Excellence in Cinematography Award at the Sundance Film Festival where it was hailed as the definitive portrait of the singer. This is an extraordinary compliment, given Smith's expansive history in music, alone. Dating back to Horses, her striking 1975 debut album, there's plenty of ground to cover in her professional adventures and there's also public interest in her secretive personal life.

Filmed over the course of eleven years, the documentary contains live performances, photographs, interviews and her art. This mixed-media approach is the only method that would befit a mixed-media life. Smith is known as a singer, musician, artist, activist, poet, painter, feminist, revolutionary, writer, hippie, punker and goddess, and it is quite a task to present all of these elements in a standard-length film.

The biopic provides an account of her evolution as an artist during a time that most others at her age would be retiring. As an artist Smith is still prolific, allowing her love of words and history to permeate all of her other projects. In fact, it seems as though her prominence has only grown throughout the years. Her singing performances are still transcendent. In concert she seems to tap into some sort of witchy shaman vibe, and behind the power of her presence on the stage and a bright smile the 61-year-old seems both eternally youthful and positively invincible.

The film screens as part of the Webster Film Series at 8 p.m. from Thursday, October 2, to Saturday, October 4.

-- Jaime Lees

• article - link
• video - link
• Patti Smith - website
• Dream of Life - website

Patti Smith, who has been called the High Priestess of Punk, is one of those Rushmore figures in the history of rock, although she's also a poet and something of a folkie. She pioneered an era when stylistic boundaries were less distinct and the only real genre was revolution. So it's it's hard to imagine a more unlikely venue for her to perform than the Joe Fresh party at the Gardiner. It was a tough crowd. This luxe event was packed with well-heeled fashionistas and young scenesters, many of whom probably had no idea who she was. Regardless, without introduction she stepped up to the microphone at the end of the room with an acoustic guitar and started to sing as if none of it mattered.

At first, she was barely audible above the hubbub. Soon she had two-thirds of the crowd enthralled, as she talked and played for about 45 minutes, unfazed by the dull roar of cocktail chatter that continued at the back. I watched from a banquette from about 10 feet away.

Displaying an uncanny mix of supreme confidence and casual self-deprecation (especially about her guitar-playing), she kept up an offhand patter, as if the room were just another folk club in the village. She had just driven in from Buffalo, after flying in from Russia via New York.

" I just got back from Moscow," she told us. "I was there for about 10 days. So I am on Moscow time which means it's about five in the morning. I'm actually in a total state of culture shock. . . I can't imagine what culture I'm a part of—especially since I'm an American I really don't know what culture I'm a part of." She went on to apologize for wearing a Berlin Film Festival guitar strap, and said it's only because she doesn't have a Toronto Film Festival guitar stap — I'm told that TIFF programmer Noah Cowan rejected Patti Smith: Dream of Life for the 2007 festival, but it went on to play Berlin and Sundance.

As she sang, people watched via the usual pixilated surveillance of cellphone cameras. Eventually she Patti gently put an end with an oblique aside: "I think you are almost done taking pictures, because by this point Robert Mapplethorpe would have had the cover of Horses."

She introduced The Whipperwill Song, a Hank Williams number, with an anecdote about rehearsing it with Ramblin' Jack Elliot for Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue in the 1970s. "I was about 25. I did get a slot on the Rolling Thunder revue, but then Joan Baez joined and there was really only room for one gal in that town."

Every so often she broke into a hacking cough. "I'm not sick, honest," she said, explaining she was allergic to the scented candles that filled the room. It's a real problem, she added, when she follows bands that play heavy-metal ballads with a lot of scented smoke.

She sang about six or seven songs, including Because the Night, which she delivered acapella, asking the crowd to fill in the choruses. Gloria turned into another sing-along, although she couldn't remember the chords, and canvassed the room for someone to play her guitar.

Remarkably, the one number that sent a hush over the entire room was The People Have the Power, although she just recited it as spoken word, and it was strangely inspiring to see this champagne-sipping, silver-lame throng fall under the spell of a hippie manifesto:

The people have the power
the people have the power.
The power to dream to rule
to wrestle us from fools

The ideal antidote to festival madness.

Put this on your life-or-death-must-see list for September. A new documentary about rock god/poet/artist/activist/genius Patti Smith premieres next month. The film, entitled Patti Smith: Dream of Life, was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize and won the Cinematography award at Sundance.

The finished product is a result of 11 years of filming by director Steven Sebring, and I’ve heard it’s a poem of a documentary. Most excitingly, Smith narrates the film, which just finished a four-day preview at the Film Forum in New York. Luckies!

There’s also a companion book coming out, which I can’t wait to get my hot little hands on. Plus, you might want to pick up Patti Smith & Kevin Shields’ (of My Bloody Valentine) recently-released CD “The Coral Sea.”

Click here to check out the film's website.

--Valentina

April 20 - May 20 Taurus
May 1, 1967 was the date that Elvis Presley wed his long time girlfriend Priscilla Beaulieu. And thanks to Mattel (they’re swell) you can now purchase a set of Elvis and Priscilla wedding day Barbies, dressed in replicas of their wedding attire, though the Priscilla doll could use a lot more eye makeup and her bouffant hair do isn’t as frozen in place as the real Mrs. P’s was that day. The packaging also contains a sticker reading Direct from Graceland. I don’t know about you, but this is one of those times where I just say – I don’t care what I have to do without; I gotta have this item. Although the real-life Elvis-Priscilla union only lasted 5 years, your dolls will live forever in the first romantic blush of their wedding day.

May 21 - June 20 Gemini
Rosanne Cash is our Gemini this week simply because she kicks ass and takes names. She was born in 1955 to country music legend Johnny Cash and his first wife Vivian Liberto right around the time Cash’s career was starting on its upward trajectory at Sun Records. She started her own career by singing backup for her dad, has written essays and fiction for The New York Times, Rolling Stone, New York Magazine and other publications, has a few books out as well, and is a Grammy Award winning singer and songwriter. Her most recent CD, Black Cadillac, received widespread critical acclaim in 2006 and she's working on a new one now. Plus she’s an active and fascinating member of the blogosphere with Mrs. L’s Monthly. She writes about everything from books she’s reading to concerts she went to the best hotel room on tour, to outrage over school shootings, to the sorry state of the world, to family and friends and life.

June 21 - July 22 Cancer
The Zodiac sign of the Crab brought us guitar virtuoso Nils Lofgren, whose career began at the tender age of 17 when he joined Neil Young’s band and contributed to the acclaimed platinum album After The Gold Rush. He’s played with all the masters, and in fact is a master himself, and by the way also – it so happens – the nicest guy in the world. He joined Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band in 1984 and used to be introduced onstage by El Jefe as “a man as sweet as life itself.” That’s no joke. Not only does Nils have a new CD out – The Loner-Nils Sings Neil – solo acoustic versions of classic Neil Young songs (available on his website) but he also has a online guitar clinic on his website with downloadable quicktime lessons for the unbelievable bargain price of $20 per session. Seriously, what are you waiting for?

July 23 - August 22 Leo
Find an awesomely cool birthday gift for your Leo friends at the wildly entertaining cyber-store Uncommon Goods. Everything from a set of Hula Rocking Glasses to a Dear Diary hidden compartment flask to the Secret Lives of US Presidents Trivia Card Game to adult sock monkey slippers – all here, and much, much more. Every time I break out the credit card to purchase a unique gift here, the accolades come back in spades. And best of all, they feature handmade, recycled and organic products and are a part of the Social Venture Network (along with Ben and Jerry’s and Google), a socially conscious network of business that value healthy communities and the human spirit as well as high returns.

August 23 - September 22 Virgo
Intelligent, genuine, conservative Virgo – I have the perfect radio station for you folks. You’ll dig the blue jeans off of Sirius Satellite Radio’s brilliant Outlaw Country channel, Steven Van Zandt’s sanctuary for the rebels and renegades, rabble rousers and rogues of country music. They’re all here: Dylan, Loretta Lynn, Steve Earle, David Allan Coe, Emmylou Harris, Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, and of course all generations of the Hank Williams Dynasty. DJ’s include Shooter Jennings, Cowboy Jack Clement, Dallas Wayne, and truckin’ music authority RigRocker. Come in, come in, breaker 1-9. Dial up this station and open a tall cold one.

September 23 - October 22 Libra
The sense of harmony and balance that is enjoyed by our Libran friends will thrill to a visit to Clayton, the Pittsburgh home of art patron and industrialist Henry Clay Frick. More than 90 percent of the original family artifacts still reside in this beautiful 23 room Victorian mansion that sits on a remarkable tract of land in the residential neighborhood of Point Breeze. Also on the property: Frick’s collection of vintage automobiles, and the full sized children’s play house. You can also have a lovely, sedate afternoon tea in the Frick Café and visit nearby Frick Park.

October 23 - November 21 Scorpio
Scorpio, thy name is independence. Passion. Intensity. Well, all those and more can be found in the storied life and career of Pittman, NJ’s own Patricia Lee Smith AKA Patti Smith, American singer-songwriter-artist-poet. Get your seductive, art loving self over to the Film Forum to see Dream of Life, the just released intimate portrait of Smith by photographer Steven Sebring, who followed her around for ten years making this film. I still remember that revelatory moment when I first heard Land (from Horses) on headphones in my college listening lounge, and realized that this woman did, as she said, hold the key to the sea of possibilities. The word genius comes close. Ever since then it’s been, for me, a brainiac amour.

November 22 - December 21 Sagittarius
Sagittarians can satiate that nagging centaurian sweet tooth with a delectable treat from Tate’s Bake Shop – physically located in Southampton, Long Island but also available in many many retail outlets throughout the New York region. Truly, their goodies are TDF – cookies, cakes, brownies, blondies, pies, you name it… they have it, and no one does it better. The crispy baked just right chocolate chip cookies literally are heaven on earth. You can order online too. There’s even a cookbook available now which includes the chocolate chip cookie recipe.

December 22 - January 19 Capricorn
There are Capricorns and there are Capricorns. But there was only one Edgar Allen Poe, born January 19, 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts. Celebrate his genius with a visit to Edgar’s Café on W. 84th Street, tucked away on the block between Broadway and West End Avenue, so named because Poe lived in this building in 1844 and 1845 and even penned The Raven here. This UWS landmark is dreamy and quiet, an oasis from the shopping frenzies taking place but a few steps away on Broadway. The salads and sandwiches are great, but they are mostly known for their many and varied amazing desserts and coffee drinks. Order yourself a slice of cognac pumpkin cheesecake and ponder over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, who knows there might also come a tapping, rapping at the chamber door, only this and nothing more. Or not…

January 20 - February 18 Aquarius
The internets never ceases to amaze and delight, n’est-ce pas Mr and Mrs Aquarius? When prepping this column I often delve into the endless toybox the world wide web provides for inspiration. And it never disappoints. This morning’s discovery: Hotels of the Rich & Famous. This site reports on celebrity sightings at various establishments around the globe and also interviews the aforementioned R&F about their favorite places to park their multiple cases of Louis Vitton luggage. Did you know that Johnny Depp favors the St. Mary in Jamaica, the Hotel Jerome in Aspen, and the Beverly Hilton? Natalie Portman likes to hang her hat at the Ritz-Carlton in New York and the Portobello Hotel in London? That Hotel Borg is the favored dwelling of celebs and politicos since 1930 in Reykjavik, Iceland and has hosted William Faulkner, Ella Fitzgerald, and Marlene Dietrich?

February 19 - March 20 Pisces
Feed that squishy, romantic Piscean side of yourself with a visit to Only Hearts, long a staple on the Upper West Side (79th and Columbus) and now with a location in Nolita (Mott between Prince and Spring). Et voila, here’s a whole store full of heart-themed gifts from lockets to notecards to picture frames. Owner Helena Stuart has also started her own clothing line of what she calls inner outerwear, lingerie that can be worn as streetwear. Don’t forget the words of Kurt Cobain: She eyes me like a pisces when I am weak; I’ve been locked inside your heart shaped box for weeks.

From Sony BMG Music Entertainment:

"Patti Smith: Dream of Life" opens today at New York City's Film Forum for a limited two-week engagement.

Permit us to discard our usual dispassionate voice and urge those interested in Patti Smith and her work to see this film.  Steven Sebring's movie, filmed over twelve years, is both entertaining and deeply moving, one of the most intimate portraits of an artist we have ever seen.  If you are interested in Patti and her work, you will love "Patti Smith: Dream of Life".

Just today we learned that the film won the Best Documentary prize at the 29th Durban International Film Festival, with this citation:

"exquisitely and sensitively filmed, this documentary goes to the heart of its subject. It captures the passion, calm, poetry and venom of an incredible human being. The film weaves us through historically charged footage right through to the present and allows us glimpses at an uncompromising and consistent energy that has always believed in the empowerment of all."

Here is a message which director Steven Sebring sent yesterday:

Greetings,

It's twelve years since this project began and we really appreciate your interest and would like to thank you for your support with this update on the film Patti Smith: Dream of life.

It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January where it received the award for best cinematography in a documentary. It is currently scheduled to screen or has been shown at the following film
festivals:

SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL, PARK CITY UTAH, USA BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL, GERMANY BOLOGNA, ITALY PHILADELPHIA FILM FESTIVAL, PENN. USA THESSALONKI FILM FESTIVAL, GREECE FULL FRAME DOCU. FESTIVAL CHAPEL HILL, USA NYON FILM FESTIVAL, SWITZERLAND BUENOS AIRES FILM FESTIVAL, BRAZIL ISTANBUL FILM FESTIVAL, TURKEY MADRID FILM FESTIVAL, SPAIN BANJALUKA FILM FESTIVAL, BOSNIA SEOUL FILM FESTIVAL, CHINA CLUJ TANSILVANIA, ROMANIA NOVISAD FILM FESTIVAL, SERBIA WASHINGTON DC FILM FESTIVAL, USA EDINBURGH FILM FESTIVAL, SCOTLAND ATHENS FILM AND VIDEO FESTIVAL, GA. USA MUNICH DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL, GERMANY SEATTLE FILM FESTIVAL, WA. USA JERUSALEM FILM FESTIVAL, ISREAL ERA NEW HORIZONS, POLAND DURBAN FILM FESTIVAL, SOUTH AFRICA PROVINCETOWN, MA. USA MILAN 2008 (SEPT 12 TO 21) VLADIVOSTOK 2008 (SEPT 13 TO 19) RIO DE JANEIRO (SEPT 25 TO OCT 9) MELBOURNE 2008 (OCT 9 TO 25) VIENNALE, AUSTRIA, 2008 (OCT 17 TO 29)

More are being added every day.

Please keep an eye on the film's website for reviews, locations and details as they are confirmed.

The International theatrical release dates will vary from country to country and city to city.

The first theatrical release was April 5th 2008 at the historical theatre LE CINEMA DU PANTHEON in Paris where it's scheduled to continue playing every Saturday for the next year. The French release of the film coincided with an enormous retrospective of Patti Smith's art, photography, and vision at the Fondation Cartier pour l'art Contemporian.

Dream of Life's American premiere was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York followed by a small performance in their garden.

The official theatrical release begins August 6th at

Film Forum
209 West Houston Street
New  York NY.10014
Tel:(212) 627-2035
www.filmforum.org

and will continue to open nationwide.
The DVD will be available starting in 2009.

For those who would like info on Patti Smith events, appearances, tour dates, or to read a souvenance or coffee break, please feel free to do so at pattismith.net and Patti's MySpace page.

Be sure to check out the film's my space page www.myspace.com/dreamoflifethemovie.

Thanks again for all your support!

Steven Sebring

Dream of Life: An Intimate Portrait of Patti Smith

Dream of Life: A Meditation on Aging and Mortality

Patti Smith: Dream of Life is a film that's been 12 years in the making, a work that reveals an intimate, impressionistic portrait of a woman who is still blazing her own trail through late middle age, a woman who has seen and suffered great loss and who is perhaps the only major surviving connection from New York City's Beat generation, to the 1970s Manhattan art scene, to the birth of punk, to the present.

For the most part, the film has been described as a paean to life, resoundingly joyous and elegiac, warm and vibrantly present, a collage of moods and moments from one immensely talented woman's richly lived time on earth. Patti Smith arrived in the big city 40 years ago and made her first residence in a room at The Chelsea Hotel, which in those days was also home to William S. Burroughs, Jefferson Airplane, Leonard Cohen, Janis Joplin, Sam Shepard, Arthur Miller, Robbert Mapplethorpe and some of the Warhol crowd. Patti soon became the muse, friend and partner of Robert Mapplethorpe, became a poet and then a performance poet and then an underground rock musician and then a rock star. She left the stage and the city to settle down in Michigan as a wife and mother. Then, following the 1994 death of her husband, the musician Fred "Sonic" Smith, she returned to New York City, to music, to poetry and to political activism.

Dream of Life is a beautiful and occasionally haunting artistic creation, a meditation on aging and mortality, an intimate study of an unusual kind of fame and the portrait of a genuinely remarkable person. The film as received with great acclaim at The Sundance Film Festival last year, as well as in Berlin and all over the film-festival world.

The videos presented below include the official trailer of Patti Smith: Dream of Life, Hope (another selection from Dream of Life); a short documentary about Smith's invited exhibition at The Cartier Foundation in Paris; an interview with Smith at the Chelston Retreat in Sussex, England; and her performance with the avant-garde musician Philip Glass at The Memorial for Allen Ginsburg.

Following the videos, biographic notes and a gallery of photographs about The Chelsea Hotel are presented.

[wpvideo woJvPV59 w=460]

Patti Smith: Dream of Life

[wpvideo 5k7WD5EH w=460]

Patti Smith: Hope (from Dream of Life)

[wpvideo m0NkKjQ5 w=460]

Patti Smith: Exhibition at the Cartier Foundation (Paris)

[wpvideo reNCsQDw w=460]

Patti Smith: Chelston Retreat Interview (Sussex, England)

[wpvideo UPpkAwnZ w=460]

Patti Smith and Philip Glass: A Memorial for Allen Ginsburg

Biographic Notes: A Portrait of One Woman’s Richly Lived Time on Earth

Patti Smith: The Early Years

Patti Smith was born in Chicago in 1948 and grew up in Woodbury, New Jersey. After graduating from high school, Patti did a brief stint as a factory worker, which convinced her to move to New York City to pursue a life in the arts. Soon after her arrival, she connected with the young photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, whom she met while working at a book store. This was a close friendship that she maintained until his death in 1989. In 1969 she went to Paris with her sister and started doing performance art. When Smith returned to New York City, she lived in The Chelsea Hotel with Mapplethorpe, and they began frequenting the then fashionable Max's Kansas City and CBGB nightclubs.

She helped put New York's punk-rock landmark CBGB on the map, at a time when New York's East Village was becoming a burgeoning center of experimental artistic creativity. She organized The Patti Smith Group and in 1975 released her debut album, Horses, to critical acclaim. Produced by John Cale, the album was described as an original mixture of exhortatory rock & roll, Smith's poetry, vocal mannerisms inspired by Mick Jagger and Jim Morrison, and the band's energetically rudimentary playing. In 1976, Aerosmith producer Jack Douglas oversaw the Patti Smith Group's second album, Radio Ethiopia, and the result was a more bombastic guitar-heavy record, tempered by the title cut, the height of Smith's improvised free rock.

After an almost nine-year hiatus, Smith returned to recording with the 1988 album Dream of Life, the work of a more mellow, but still rebellious songwriter. Smith's comeback album was co-produced by her husband, Fred "Sonic" Smith, with songs that included her call-to-arms, People Have the Power.

Grief and Mourning

In 1994, her husband died of a heart attack at the age of 45. Just a month later, her younger brother (and former road manager) Todd, also died of a heart attack. Her longtime friend and companion Robert Mapplethorpe had already died of AIDS in 1989. Determined to carry on as a tribute to the encouragement that her husband and brother had shown her before their passings, Smith performed a string of opening dates with Bob Dylan in late 1995 and issued the intensely personal Gone Again in 1996. The album offered a potent mix of songs about mourning and rebirth, reflecting Smith's belief that the beauty of life survives death.

But another eight years would pass by before her second artistic comeback, marked by a trio of acclaimed albums released in quick succession, which found her fighting her way out of a period of intense personal grief stemming from the loss of several of the most important people in her life. The documentary Patti Smith: Dream of Life premiered at last year's Sundance Film Festival and is currently opening in theaters nationwide and in Europe.

Audio: Bob Dylan/Farewell

[audio=http://members.aol.com/sceggy1/farewell.mp3|lefticon=0xcf36ff|righticon=0xcf36ff]

New York City's Elegant Dowger: The Chelsea Hotel: Dream of Life

Technorati: Patti Smith, Dream of Life, Patti Smith: Dream of Life, Robert Mapplethorpe, Bob Dylan, The Chelsea Hotel, The East Village, documentary, film, movie, motion picture, Sundance Film Festival, New York City, NYC, Paris, France, England, CBGB, People Have the Power, art, gay, GLBT, celebrities, personalities, photos, photographs, photography, photo-gallery, gallery, slideshow, music, songs, entertainment, video, music video, WordPress video, culture, cultural ideas, cultural life, cultural, social, social ideas, social life, society, news, world

Please Remember Me and Bookmark This:

Directed by Steven Sebring. It looks good. Check it out!

]]> http://darkstarfilms.wordpress.com/?p=221 Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:52:20 +0000 nico nsb http://darkstarfilms.fr.wordpress.com/2008/04/28/programme-tv/ A voir en ce moment, le superbe documentaire 'PATTI SMITH-DREAM OF LIFE', sorti en salle au début du mois d'Avril (une salle sur Paris ?), mais actuellement diffusé et rediffusé sur Arte. A vos enregistrements pour découvrir le portrait passionnant d'une artiste Américaine, chanteuse, poétesse et femme enragée/engagée. Ce film de Steven Sebring est le résultat d'un travail qui s'étalle sur dix ans.

Patti Smith: Dream of Life as An American Experience

Patti Smith: The Early Years

Patti Smith was born in Chicago in 1948 and grew up in Woodbury, New Jersey. After graduating from high school, Patti did a brief stint as a factory worker, which convinced her to move to New York City to pursue a life in the arts. Soon after her arrival, she connected with the young photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, whom she met while working at a book store. This was a close friendship that she maintained until his death in 1989. In 1969 she went to Paris with her sister and started doing performance art. When Smith returned to New York City, she lived in The Chelsea Hotel with Mapplethorpe, and they began frequenting the then fashionable Max's Kansas City and CBGB nightclubs.

Audio: Bob Dylan/Farewell

[audio=http://members.aol.com/sceggy1/farewell.mp3]

She helped put New York's punk-rock landmark CBGB on the map, at a time when New York's East Village was becoming a burgeoning center of experimental artistic creativity. She organized The Patti Smith Group and in 1975 released her debut album, Horses, to critical acclaim. Produced by John Cale, the album was described as an original mixture of exhortatory rock & roll, Smith's poetry, vocal mannerisms inspired by Mick Jagger and Jim Morrison, and the band's energetically rudimentary playing. In 1976, Aerosmith producer Jack Douglas oversaw the Patti Smith Group's second album, Radio Ethiopia, and the result was a more bombastic guitar-heavy record, tempered by the title cut, the height of Smith's improvised free rock.

Grief and Mourning

After an almost nine-year hiatus, Smith returned to recording with the 1988 album Dream of Life, the work of a more mellow, but still rebellious songwriter. Smith's comeback album was co-produced by her husband, Fred "Sonic" Smith, with songs that included her call-to-arms, People Have the Power.

[video 6596 w=435]

People Have the Power

In 1994, her husband died of a heart attack at age 45. A month later, her younger brother (and former road manager), Todd, also died of a heart attack. Her longtime friend Robert Mapplethorpe had already died of AIDS in 1989. Determined to carry on as a tribute to the encouragement her husband and brother had shown her before their passing, Smith performed a string of opening dates with Bob Dylan in late 1995 and issued the intensely personal Gone Again in 1996. The album offered a potent mix of songs about mourning and rebirth, reflecting Smith's belief that the beauty of life survives death.

Dream of Life: A Film Finds a Rocker's Heart

But another eight years would pass before her second artistic comeback, marked by a trio of acclaimed albums released in quick succession, which found her fighting her way out of a period of intense personal grief stemming from the loss of several of the most important people in her life. The documentary Patti Smith: Dream of Life premiered at this year's Sundance Film Festival.

What is it like to make a documentary about Patti Smith, the godmother of punk, once all spatter and spit, and the documentary were a different project: not a nostalgia act, but an exploration of real things, like art and family and loss, and not the romantic death found in a rock-and-roll lyric, but the literal kind, the kind that took Smith's husband away?

William Booth published a very thoughtful article about Patti Smith and the making of Patti Smith: Dream of Life in yesterday's edition of The Washington Post:

"You might have something like Steven Sebring's "Patti Smith: Dream of Life," a collaboration between an exceptionally tenacious fashion photographer and his subject, who is now 61 years old and trying to sort it all out. "I was never interested in a rockumentary or a behind-the-scenes thing. I have no interest in that," says Smith of the film, which premiered at Sundance in January and will be shown this Friday at Filmfest DC with guest appearances by Smith and Sebring. Next year the documentary will air on PBS.

Smith met Sebring for a photo shoot for Spin magazine in 1995, just as Smith was coming back into the public sphere after a long hiatus from performing. During the years of her retreat to the suburbs of Detroit, she saw the deaths of her close friend and muse, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe; her pianist, Richard Sohl; her husband, the musician Fred "Sonic" Smith of MC5; and her brother Todd. "Just year after year, month after month, of loss," Smith says. "I was pretty shattered as a human being and I had the responsibility of two young children and I had to really start over again. The movie is really about experiencing joy in life in the saddest of times."

Sebring, alone, without a crew, filmed Smith for 11 years, using available light, and the photography is often quite beautiful by itself, a lovely home movie. The result is a collage that is intimate, arty, pretentious, and a very respectful work by a documentarian who is open about his enthusiasms. "They call her the punk poet prophet," Sebring says. "I feel like one of her soldiers, one of her messengers."

Smith was never a traditional pop star. She had only one big hit, the song "Because the Night," which she wrote with Bruce Springsteen. But beginning with her debut album, "Horses," released in 1975, she created a raw, stripped-down garage sound that combined spoken words, screamed words and three chords per song. Her downtown music, and her style as the androgynous boho in a Bob Dylan pose, has been cited as an influence by bands such as U2 and R.E.M. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last year, the organization praising "the delirious release of an inspired amateur who knew her voice conveyed more honest passion than any note-perfect rock professional." The French minister of culture named her a Commander of the Order of Arts and Literature.

When Smith was a teenager she worked in a factory and dropped out of college. She was like Juno before the movie "Juno," a pregnant teenager who gave up her baby for adoption. She made enough money to move to New York and found her home in the Chelsea Hotel, which in 1970 housed William S. Burroughs, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, Sam Shepard, Robbert Mapplethorpe and some of the Warhol crowd.

"So many of my mentors were quite a bit older than me," Smith says. "In my early 20s, I met Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Gregory Corso, and I was very privileged to meet these people and learn from them. You forget about age if you're creatively engaged. A lot of it is being engaged. It can be manual labor. Charting the stars, sweeping the streets, it doesn't have to be the arts."

Later, Smith says, "If you live long enough, you're a little old lady with your memories." We mention that we like the idea of revisiting our aging pop stars, if they still have something to say. Is it possible they may even grow more interesting as they age? Smith says, "Well, I'm always looking forward. As a mother, you hope for a good future, a good future for your children. And as an artist, always looking toward the next poem, the next song, the next film, the next idea. It's what the imagination is for. I remember talking to Gregory Corso before he died." Corso was a founding member of the Beat generation of writers. "Because he was so fearless. I asked, 'Gregory, aren't you afraid?' 'Only one thing,' he said. 'I'm afraid of the collapse of the imagination.' That's something I think about every single day."

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Patti Smith: Dream of Life (Trailer)

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Patti Smith on Patti Smith: Dream of Life

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La mítica banda de rock desfilará por la alfombra roja del Festival Internacional de Cine de la capital germana a la vez que Scorsese mostrará un documental sobre ellos. La diva del pop presentará su opera prima en celuloide y la artista punk ofrecerá un convierto en vivo.

Los Rolling Stones desfilarán el jueves por la alfombra roja del Festival Internacional de Cine de Berlín, que se inaugurará con "Shine a Light", del estadounidense Martin Scorsese, un documental centrado en la mítica banda británica de rock.

Además de Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts y Ron Wood, los cuatro miembros de la mítica banda, la Berlinale también convoca a Madonna y Patti Smith.

La diva pop presentará su debut como directora con el corto "Filth and Wisdom", que se verá en la sección Panorama, y la artista punk, objeto del documental de Steven Sebring "Patti Smith: Dream of Life", ofrecerá un concierto durante el festival.

También en clave musical pero sin la marca del rock, el encuentro cinematográfico que este año aspira a vender 200.000 entradas, atenderá asuntos melómanos de la Argentina e Irak, según detalló un despacho de la agencia alemana DPA.

El documental argentino "El café de los maestros", de Miguel Kohan, es un proyecto apadrinado por Gustavo Santaolalla que tributa a varias de las grandes figuras de la vieja guardia tanguera.

Y Eddy Moretti y Suroosh Alvi siguieron la carrera musical de una banda iraquí, desde la caída de Saddam Hussein hasta el presente en un filme titulado "Heavy Metal in Baghdad".

Con un jurado presidido por el realizador griego Constantin Costa Gavras, 26 títulos pugnarán en la Sección Competitiva de la muestra alemana.

Sin créditos argentinos en la Sección Oficial, el filme brasileño "Tropa de elite", de José Padilha, y "Lake Tahoe", del mexicano Fernando Eimbcke, serán los representantes de Latinoamérica que competirán por el Oso de Oro, máximo galardón que entrega la muestra.

La cinta "Petróleo sangriento", del talentoso realizador norteamericano Paul T. Anderson y protagonizado por Daniel Day Lewis; "Elegy" de la española Isabel Coixet pero hablada en inglés y "Ballasta" de Lance Hammer, son algunos de los filmes de la Sección Oficial Competitiva.

SHINE A LIGHT de Martin Scorsese

PATTI SMITH: DREAM OF LIFE de Steven Sebring

Patti Smith: Dream of Life as An American Experience

Patti Smith: The Early Years

Patti Smith was born in Chicago in 1948 and grew up in Woodbury, New Jersey. After graduating from high school, Patti did a brief stint as a factory worker, which convinced her to move to New York City to pursue a life in the arts. Soon after her arrival, she connected with the young photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, whom she met while working at a book store. This was a close friendship that she maintained until his death in 1989. In 1969 she went to Paris with her sister and started doing performance art. When Smith returned to New York City, she lived in the Chelsea Hotel with Mapplethorpe, and they began frequenting the then fashionable Max's Kansas City and CBGB nightclubs.

She helped put New York's punk-rock landmark CBGB on the map. She organized The Patti Smith Group and in 1975 released her debut album, Horses, to critical acclaim. Produced by John Cale, the album was described as an original mixture of exhortatory rock & roll, Smith's poetry, vocal mannerisms inspired by Mick Jagger and Jim Morrison, and the band's energetically rudimentary playing. In 1976, Aerosmith producer Jack Douglas oversaw the Patti Smith Group's second album, Radio Ethiopia, and the result was a more bombastic guitar-heavy record, tempered by the title cut, the height of Smith's improvised free rock.

Grief and Mourning

After an almost nine-year hiatus, Smith returned to recording with the 1988 album Dream of Life, the work of a more mellow, but still rebellious songwriter. Smith's comeback album was co-produced by her husband, Fred "Sonic" Smith, with songs that included her call-to-arms, People Have the Power.

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People Have the Power

In 1994, her husband died of a heart attack at age 45. A month later, her younger brother (and former road manager), Todd, also died of a heart attack. Her longtime friend Robert Mapplethorpe had already died of AIDS in 1989. Determined to carry on as a tribute to the encouragement her husband and brother had shown her before their passing, Smith performed a string of opening dates with Bob Dylan in late 1995 and issued the intensely personal Gone Again in 1996. The album offered a potent mix of songs about mourning and rebirth, reflecting Smith's belief that the beauty of life survives death.

Patti Smith: Dream of Life

But another eight years would pass before her second artistic comeback, marked by a trio of acclaimed albums released in quick succession, which found her fighting her way out of a period of intense personal grief stemming from the loss of several of the most important people in her life. The documentary Patti Smith: Dream of Life premiered at this year's Sundance Film Festival.

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Patti Smith: Dream of Life (Trailer)

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Patti Smith on Patti Smith: Dream of Life

Technorati: Patti Smith, Dream of Life, Patti Smith: Dream of Life, Robert Mapplethorpe, Bob Dylan, The Chelsea Hotel, documentary, film, movie, motion picture, Sundance Film Festival, New York City, NYC, CBGB, People Have the Power, art, gay, GLBT, celebrities, personalities, photos, photographs, photography, music, songs, entertainment, video, music video, WordPress video, culture, cultural ideas, cultural life, cultural, social, social ideas, social life, society, news, world

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