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Movie Chile Review

Pina

By: Michael Wade Simpson
Published online: Friday, February 17, 2012
Appeared in: Pasateimpo

Capsule review

Wim Wenders, the German filmmaker known for Wings of Desire and Paris, Texas, has created a stunning documentary about choreographer Pina Bausch, who died suddenly in 2009. The film, nominated for an Academy Award in the Documentary Feature category, uses 3-D technology in a surprising way. Instead of taking you on a thrill ride, the director uses the broadening of the senses that the extra-dimensional technique offers to draw you into Bausch’s dances and to create intimacy that sometimes borders on the extreme. Rated PG. 103 minutes. In various languages with subtitles. Screens in 3-D only.

Full Review

Pina, documentary, rated PG, Regal Stadium 14, 4 chiles

Wim Wenders, the German filmmaker known for works such as Wings of Desire and Paris, Texas, has created a stunning documentary about the choreographer Pina Bausch, who died suddenly in 2009. The film, nominated for an Academy Award in the Documentary Feature category, uses 3-D technology in a surprising way. Instead of taking you on a thrill ride with dancing, the director uses the broadening of the senses that the extra-dimensional technique offers to draw you into Bausch’s dances, to create intimacy that sometimes borders on the extreme.

In Bausch’s particular movement language, wrought with male-female conflict, often at the edges between sensuality and violence, what may not be spectacularly technical, dance-wise, is often deeply felt. Wenders, who was a friend of Bausch’s and had begun working with the choreographer on the project, understood and appreciated this. His film documents the details, letting dancers recount asides the choreographer would offer that changed their lives, and then takes things macro — expanding the possibilities of filmed dance by breaking out of the bounds of the rehearsal hall and performance settings and taking dance sequences out into the world. It’s a performance as much as it is a documentary.

Just as the footage of all those von Trapp kids singing and dancing through the sites of Salzburg turned a silly Rodgers and Hammerstein musical into a cinematic event, Wenders has Bausch company dancers all over the troupe’s hometown of Wuppertal, Germany, strangely gesturing on escalators, marching through public plazas, throwing themselves onto banks of mining refuse, and performing romantic interludes, clad in evening gowns and suits, on traffic medians at rush hour. Every sequence has its own logic, every location an oddness that works. Every uncomfortable juxtaposition of grace and ugliness seems to match, sometimes eerily, the ideas for which Bausch became famous. Even the floating trams of Wuppertal’s Schwebebahn mass-transit system hang on their tracks and swish gracefully over the river Wupper, becoming players in Wenders’ Bausch-like dance.

Of course, some of the footage belongs indoors. Early in the film, Wenders parks his camera in the dirt. A stage is carefully covered in peat for a production of her 1975 version of The Rite of Spring. Perhaps because Bausch’s choreography is rarely about what the feet and legs are doing, Wenders comes in close to hands and torsos, lips, eyes, mouths, and hair. As Stravinsky’s haunting music plays in the background, Wenders’ camera is so much a part of the action that you can see and hear the filmy material of a prone female dancer’s costume pass over her skin, her fingers moving through soil, her breath a ragged contrast to the music, her face already smudged with fear.

This dance is about rape and ritual sacrifice, and a gang of sweaty bodies becoming stained with earth seems not only appropriate but inevitable. Bausch’s later works moved away from such a strong group dynamic, becoming linked vignettes, often with striking scenic elements such as water, leaves, thousands of red carnations, or grass. There were strings of solos with interruptions, and images that were repetitious, like dreams (and often as indecipherable). Wenders’ decision to place an extended sequence of Rite of Spring near the beginning of the film brings you into her art in the most visceral way.

Later, things veer monotonously into the abstract. Long sequences from Café Müller (1978) feature women gesturing with their eyes closed in a café littered with tables and chairs. Wenders may be trying to describe the choreographer’s thematic obsessions (Bausch’s parents owned an inn, and she is shown dancing in early productions of the piece), but images of bodies slumped against walls and over tables are about as exciting as you would expect.

As a documentarian, Wenders has a certain magical disdain for tradition. Instead of talking heads, he offers slow, static close-up shots of dancers’ faces, with their thoughts offered later in voice-overs. Bausch’s choreographic method was to involve the dancers’ deepest emotions. One dancer describes Bausch asking him to exemplify pure joy. The group sequence that follows is a party of disco moves — devoid of modern-dance cliché. “All her dances were about love and pain,” says another. Aging doesn’t seem to be an issue in her company, and one of the veteran members describes with pride how being an old dancer opened up possibilities for her, at least in Bausch’s world.

Bausch’s voice is heard early in the film, saying that there are situations that leave you utterly speechless in life and that dance comes in where words end. “Dance, dance,” her voice returns at the end of the film. “Otherwise, we are lost.” Wenders’ film wonderfully captures the essence of a choreographer’s aesthetic, and meets her creativity in an artist’s way, which is the ultimate sign of respect.