The best trip to the cinema Patti Smith has ever had: “It’s entering another world”
At some point in the 1960s, a teenage Patti Smith had started off with poetry after listening to Bob Dylan. By 1967, she had left her Chicagoan home behind and delved into the melee of Manhattan’s culture. In this liberated world, the hardships of tough city living were always tempered by the boon of art and the sanguine hue of creative spirit.
Smith forged an identity as a modern renaissance woman within this menagerie of art and civility. Even now, she considers herself as much a painter as a musician. Whether it is consuming art or creating it, she hurls herself forth. “In art and dream, may you proceed with abandon. In life, may you proceed with balance and stealth,” she writes.
This was, in truth, how she helped to save guitar music, by absorbing the culture around her with such vigour that she became a conduit to the vitality of youthful art. With it being New York in the 1970s, cinema was a huge part of this, and it has always remained a major passion for Patti.
“One of my most wonderful [memories] was seeing [Akira] Kurosawa’s Ran [1985] with my husband in Detroit on my birthday,” she told Interview. “Because when we went into the movie theater it was a clear day, the movie was like four hours long or something, and there was a snowstorm while we were in the movie theater and the movie was so intense, and when we came out there had been a blizzard and the whole world was covered in snow.”
Therein lies part of the beauty of going to the cinema, full stop: the world around you is just that little bit more affecting and visceral when you emerge from the darkened cove. As Smith continues: “So we felt like we had never left the movie. But I don’t have bad experiences at movies because I love the movies. I only go to movies that I know I’m gonna love. It’s entering another world.”
As it happens, entering that world is actually good for you. Neuroscientists have found that watching films in a group produces much stronger emotional reactions than watching alone. Humans are a communal species and the sharing of stories has been vital to our evolution. Weirdly, our emotions and bodily functions have even been shown to synchronise somewhat when we’re at the cinema.
Thus, when Smith asserts that you enter the theatre, you emerge into a new world thereafter; it is not purely linked to any fortuitous snow storm, but a hard-wired response to feel more connected with the world.
