Steven Sebring's new documentary Patti Smith: Dream of Life did not begin as a labor of love. In 1996, Sebring was a fashion photographer who had been hired by Spin magazine to shoot pictures of Smith, the timeless dark lady of punk, on the occasion of the release of Gone Again, he first album in eight years. At the time, he had never made a movie and barely knew who Smith was. But as Sebring described it to Terrence Rafferty, when he and Smith met for the first time, they both sensed "an immediate connection," and when he saw her perform at Irving Plaza, where she kicked off her first tour in more than fifteen years, something in Sebring's head caught fire. "She was a totally different woman onstage, nothing like the person I’d photographed in Detroit. I thought, this is too interesting not to put on film.”
Dream of Life, the end result of that thought, was shot, in 16 mm., over the course of many years of Sebring, the self-financing first-time director, taking time off from work to chase the once-reculsive Smith around the world. “Patti really let me into her life,” he says. “I think it intrigued her that I didn’t know a lot about her, that I’d just be getting to know her through my lens.” Sebring's devotion to his craft dictated some decisions that help set the film apart from the run of current rock docs, such as his determination to stick to film and not shoot it on video; cost and availability dictated other choices, such as the relative absence of what Rafferty terms "the usual punk-documentary mix of archival performance footage, talking-head encomiums and wistful stills of the grungy exterior of CBGB." "We didn't find a lot" of that kind of stuff, says Sebring, and some of what they did find, such as "some footage of Patti on The Mike Douglas Show, which she'd forgotten about completely," was priced out of reach. (Patti's encounter with Tom Snyder has, thankfully, made it to DVD. But what about the late-70s appearance on a local New York show where Smith, in one of her goofball moods, explained that punk rock was a further development of skunk rock, then discombobulated the host by revealing that "I'm breathin' Russian fly germs on ya.") Between Sebring's fruitful amateurism and Smith's healthy fascination with her own eccentricity, Dream of Life may turn out to be the most "handmade" in Rafferty's words) celebrity profile to hit movie screens this summer, albeit one shot with the sure instincts of a trained professional cameraman. ("“Being a fashion photographer, I made sure she looked her best all the time.") Sebring reports that Patti "looks at this as a home movie," then adds, "a home movie that’s also some kind of collaborative art piece.”