Sundance: 'Patti Smith: Dream of Life,' "...Sexual Failures,' 'American Teen'

Now that I've sparked an international incident, it's time to get back to talking about movies.

Is Patti Smith: Dream of Life, which premiered here last night, actually a documentary? I don’t think so, and I don’t think the film’s director, Steven Sebring, or the film’s subject/inspiration/creative collaborator Ms. Smith do, either. Yes, it’s replete with unstaged or “documentary” footage—replete is not even the right word, I’d have to say such footage makes up at least 90% of the picture. The strumalong with Sam Shepard in the picture was clearly an arranged meeting, and the two are, in the most obvious sense, performing—for the camera, for each other—but it’s not an overt contrivance. Still, Dream of Life does not aspire to the condition of a music doc. There are no talking head interviews with famous people explaining just why Smith is so great/significant. There’s her voice, the people in her life, her joshing of the filmmaker, her band, her shows, her reflections, her anger, her political activism, her perpetually unsquelchable and perpetually winning girlish side, her artistry, her shamanism (I think Smith is the only contemporary performer for which this term can be used), her occasional wrong-headedness, her peculiar passionate attachment to/aesthetic disengagement from rock and roll, and more, in a mélange of varied film stocks and color palettes. Some of it doesn’t work but most of it does and as a whole, while it’s not likely to win any converts, it’s a spellbinder. But it’s not a documentary, it’s a document.

Two other films up here pitch themselves as documentaries, but I think of them as enhanced documentaries.

Chris Waitt’s A Complete History of My Sexual Failures, in which Waitt, a sad-sack British filmmaker reflecting on his lonely lot in life, attempts to figure out what went wrong. Interviewing ex-girlfriends (some of whom a remarkably vehement in their acrimony), soliciting varied forms of therapy, Waitt puts quite a bit on the line. It’s as wince-worthy and funny as you might have heard already, but it’s also kind of full of shit. There’s a disingenuosness to the persona Waitt puts on that raises one’s suspicions at certain points. Walking around a Glasgow suburb with a big fuzzy boom mike tucked under his arm as he goes from one ex’s house to another for doorstep confrontations; is he so thick that he doesn’t believe he’ll be treated like a nutter or a stalker? Similarly, later in the film, after a drug interaction gone badly wrong, he puts himself out on the street in the same get up (his ripped up jeans are starting to sag so badly that almost every shot of Waitt is a feast of asscrack), and asks random women to have sex with him, persisting in this project until he is hauled off by the police. Waitt’s being taped by a crewperson throughout; are we to believe that getting arrested wasn’t part of this particular shoot’s overall plan? Waitt confirmed some of my suspicions by showing up to the Q&A in roughly the same getup he wears throughout the picture. How is it a documentary if the lead figure is in costume?

Nanette Burstein’s American Teen is a frequently engaging look at the lives of about a half-dozen high-school seniors in Warsaw, Illinois Indiana, as they prepare to leave the world of adolescence and enter young adulthood. Sound like the kind of subject Frederick Wiseman might take on…but not like this, not hardly. Burstein’s trim, fast-moving film utilizes tricks and techniques that would give old-schoolers such as Wiseman and the Maysles Brothers rage attacks. The pop soundtrack, the voiceovers, the graphic collages, the ANIMATION SEQUENCES illustrating the dreams and desires of some of its subjects…none of it’s a surprise, coming as it does from the co-director of the Bob Evans fantasia The Kid Stays in the Picture, but all of it does raise the question of just how documentary is defining itself these days. Other factors at work in Burstein’s film are that she’s dealing with a generation that’s totally at home living in front of cameras, and competing as a filmmaker with the likes of The Hills.

What does it all mean? I dunno. I gotta go see more movies.

Comments

[Nance]

That's Warsaw, Indiana, not Illinois. Don't feel bad for the mistake. People on the coasts are always getting those I-states mixed up.

[Chad Channing]

Docs need an enema. Going back to the way Wiseman made them is a good place to start. This is just one old drummer's opinion. Directors need to erase their presence as much as possible. Wiseman's Missle, Maysle's Salesman -- give me the people who inhabit the mileiu, that's what makes a doc fascinating to me, not how the director can manipulate the images. The camera itself is enough of a manipulation. Heisenberg's Principle is flawless, immaculate. If you can't find enough nuggets in 30 to 90 (?) hours of raw footage then maybe you're in the wrong business. I am purist. All you need is a guitar, a bass, and a set of drums. Sometimes you don't even need a bass. Calvin Johnson would agree with me. I think. Who knows. Sometimes he likes to disagree just to do it. Sometimes he's an asshole. So am I.

[David Hudson]

I could devote a blog entry to maps of Illinois and Indiana and note that the IMDb entry does indeed... Nah, that'd be silly.

[Glenn Kenny]

Ahem. As the happy husband of a proud daughter of Blue Springs, Missouri, I try to be extra scrupulous in my references to any states west of Pennsylvania, so this error stings. Two things happened. First, although "Indiana" is mentioned several times in the beginning, at some point one of the kids makes a road trip to Chicago. That stuck in my head. The other thing that happened: Sundance. Really. When I went to strike the erroneous state and fill in the correct one, what I first did was fill in the incorrect one. Again. The atmosphere here is anti-blogging, I swear.

[Chad Channing]

When someone says they're proud of being from [Your Hometown's Name Here] I think of hostages who have been forced to act in videotaped confessions. It's one of those things that sounds coded to me. Just one time in my life I'd like to spend a couple of weeks in the snow watching movies. I think I would be good at that. Something tells me that seeing a movie in Park City would be an unplesant experience. A lot of people on their cell phones and latecomers asking whole rows to move down one seat. The asshole to nonasshole ratio must be top heavy. But I guess I could overlook the annoyances if I saw five or six good movies. I haven't seen a five of six good movies in the last six months let alone two weeks. The last good movie I saw was Smiley Face. Anna Faris is cute like a bug. Smiley Face seems like the type of movie that would play well at Sundance if Sundance had a sense of humor. I bet there's a lot of self-serious douchebags in Sundance. This is where I would normally say something self-deprecating. Fuck that. I am feeling all powerful like an old wooden shjip.

[Claire K.]

Ahem, AHEM. I'm actually going to have to interject a minor correction in here, myself. Though it's true that I went to high school in Blue Springs, I am, technically speaking, a proud daughter of INDEPENDENCE, Missouri. Home of Harry Truman, and starting point for the Oregon, Santa Fe, and California Trails.

BOO-yah.

[Tess]

Chad, do you have a girlfriend? I'm relatively confident I'm falling in love with you. Then, we can live happily ever after & you can forget where I'm from.

[Chad Channing]

Tess, meet me back her in this thread tomorrow night, 1.24, at 1159 PM. Everopne will be asleep. No one reads that late at night. I want to go hardcore digital with you. Wear something short. No underwear. I can't wait. It's been almost ten years. You make me feel like a man. If I get too rough tell me and I will stop. I don't want to do anything that doesn't make you feel good. We can go slow or we can go fast. I like to go fast but I can go slow for you. You are so beautiful. The most beautiful girl in the world. That's right. You heard what I said. I'm so fucking nervous right now. Maybe I should lock the door.

[MW]

Anyone else remember that RJ Cutler doc series "American High" from 2000? Documented an Illinois High School over the course of a year. Really gripping stuff that wasn't able to catch enough of an audience on the tube. I didn't get to catch Bursteen's film, but all the talk of it did make me want to track down and revisit this: http://imdb.com/title/tt0254888/

[Tess]

I'm here, Chad. Where are you?

[Chad Channing]

I'm right here, on the West Coast. Hello? Tess? Did you already leave? Damn it.

[Tess]

Nope, I'm here.

[Tess]

tessinbloom@hotmail.com

[Chad Channing]

Tess, our dialogue sounds like something out of a bad Neil Simon movie, or, as I like to call them, The Movies That Neil Simon Directed. I'm guessing that you live on the East Coast, probably in New York, Jersey, Penn. I am stuck here in Los Angeles. The three hour time difference could be a curse. You sound lovely. Of course, you could be a 55 year old man on disability, and I could be an 18 year old girl who just dropped out of USC. The vagaries of the internet are begging for someone of Wittgenstein-ian intellect to explain it all. Everyone's connected, right? Not us.

[Suzy]

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