My mission, I feel, is to wake people up, not to entertain them,” says Patti Smith to a radio interviewer in a new film on the life, times and world tour of the recently resurrected high priestess of rock.
The same could be said of the film on Smith – that its mission is to wake people up rather than just entertain them. Although still undergoing editing changes and as yet untitled, the film-makers – South African artist Phillip Hunt and American stills photographer Steven Sebring – intend to be shopping their project at the Cannes Film Festival later this year.
“This started as a project between us and Patti,” says Hunt, who was back in the country recently with a near-final edit of the Smith film. “But when we got to editing Patti was in the studio recording her new album. When she saw our cuts she was blown away. She’s fully behind the project, she had just been expecting more of a life-on-the-road, people-building-sets kind of thing.”
What she got is a black-and-white epic that traces her inner journey and revolutionary politics with alarming poignancy and unexpected bursts of colour as the pathos mounts. The whole thing was shot by Hunt, also a stills photographer, on grainy 16mm film across four continents over a five-year period.
The shoot ended with Smith’s 1999 South Pacific tour where she shared a stage with Bob Dylan across Australia and New Zealand. It began in London in 1995 when Smith returned to the stage with her first European tour after more than a decade out of the public eye. After her runaway success in the post-punk Seventies – when she won a Grammy for Best New Artist and had a number one hit, Because the Night, with Bruce Springsteen – she retired, married, moved to Detroit, had two children and produced music. Hunt’s film is thus her celluloid coming out and the first glimpse that fans will have of the globe’s response to one of the most enduring figures in modern music.
One of the more fascinating things about the film is seeing the sheer mass of young fans – from Tokyo to Atlanta – that turn out at Smith’s concerts.
“What was weird was you got old guys who remember her from the Seventies and then all these teenagers,” says Hunt. “I never figured out how these kids made the leap. The only reason can be that she developed this cult status in her absence,” he adds.
“There’s no real plot to life. It’s a journey. We may be infinite, but life is not,” begins the film. It moves into a lyrical flow of travel and philosophy, into hotel rooms and backstage corridors, before stopping by Smith’s parents in New Jersey and lingering on her life as a mother.
Smith’s theories on motion build steadily to a political crescendo in Washington, calling for a new global revolution to the strains of Rock’n’Roll Nigger. “If you want to be outside of society, you must take the responsibility,” chants Smith.
The film, says Hunt, will be marketed on a new website and will be translated into book form, all of which will be used as part of a package to promote Smith’s new album, Gung Ho, which is due for a March release.
Hunt, in the meanwhile, will be returning to the country for his third solo exhibition at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg in July this year.