Dance Movie

Filmmaker Wim Wender's latest movie is a tribute to late German choreographer Pina Bausch.

By David-Elijah Nahmod

©Neue Road Movies GmbH, Photos by Donata Wenders.

Dancing To Live

Filmmaker Wim Wenders celebrates the life and work of Pina Bausch

A handsome man dances madly about, running from side to side of a huge glass room. He stretches out his arms, his agony visible in his face and eyes. "Andre!" he calls out. "Andre!"

It's one of a number of hypnotic avante-garde dance pieces in the new movie Pina, filmmaker Wim Wenders tribute to the late German choreographer Pina Bausch.

When the film was conceived, Bausch was set to participate in the project. But when she died unexpectedly in 2009, a mere five days after being diagnosed with a form of cancer, the acclaimed German filmmaker pulled the plug on the project.

But Bausch's dancers urged Wenders to forge on. And the result stands as an homage to Bausch and her troupe, Tanztheatre Wuppertal Pina Bausch, which has performed all over the world.

Wenders, known for such films as Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire, said he had no interest in dance until he discovered Bausch on a trip to Venice, Italy, in 1985 and became intrigued.

"Pina Bausch's work was definitely neither ballet, nor modern dance, nor pantomime, nor theater," Wenders said in an e-mail interview. "It was something all together new. Dance put upside down, or in my book, put back on its feet.

Wim Wenders

"Pina's priorities were clearly not aesthetic ones but seemed to be the same questions that are driving contemporary cinema or literature: Who we are? What are we here for? How can we love? How can we be understood?"

Wenders offered a quote from Bausch herself: "I'm not interested in how my dancers move, I'm interested in what moves them."

"For Pina, dance was really a way to find out about men and women, to explore the human condition," Wenders said. "For her, we expressed everything with our body language that words can no longer grasp, or had gotten wrong, or had turned into clichés. Pina really meant it when she said, ‘Dance! Dance! Otherwise we are lost!'"

Unusual for a documentary, Wenders shot Pina in 3D. The format creates the ambiance of a live performance and pulls the viewer into the action of a number of thrilling, if dangerous, images.

In one sequence, a dancer performs acrobatic steps alongside a steep cliff. The 3D effect underscores both the desperation of the character and the potential danger that the dancer places himself in for the sake of his art.

"The dancer's kingdom, their very element, is space. With each and every gesture, step or movement, they conquer it from scratch," Wenders said. "And space was exactly what cinema could never handle. Whatever we did with fancy camera moves, cranes, helicopters, steadi-cam, always ended up on a two-dimensional screen. And there, space was always fake, make believe.

"Only the arrival of 3D changed that. For the first time, I could be in the dancer's realm, truly with them, no longer outside looking in. 3D and dance were made for each other, and I think I was proven right."

The dancers encompass a variety of ethnicities, age groups and body types. "Her company was some sort of Utopian humanity. They were from all continents, spoke many languages, were too old for other companies, too voluptuous, too skinny or too short," Wenders said.

"These dancers were themselves," he continued. "That's all Pina wanted them to be. No role models, no athletes, no perfect bodies, just themselves, as truly and beautifully as possible. She wants us to recognize ourselves in these dancers, with our flaws and deficiencies."

Wender said that there were a lot of tears among Pina's dancers when they saw the final film. "That was an incredibly emotional moment," he said. -E

VITAL STATISTICS

Pina
Opens Feb. 10 at Harkins Scottsdale 101 and UltraLuxe Scottsdale
Rated: PG
1 hour, 46 minutes