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| Wim Wenders takes us to the river in Pina. |
* * * Pina. Written and directed by Wim Wenders. In English, German, and French.
Inside the world of modern dance, the profile of German choreographer Pina Bausch was as high as Bill T. Jones, Alvin Ailey, Mark Morris, Merce Cunningham and other, more recognizable names. This will likely change for the rest of us with the arrival of Wim (Wings of Desire, Paris Texas) Wenders’ film tribute, Pina. Though it has been nominated for the Best Documentary Oscar this year, calling Wenders’ film a “documentary” arguably stretches the term too far. What Pina “documents” is a truly visionary imagination whose productions could be as surpassingly strange as any fiction.
Like the works of many of her contemporaries, Bausch created original dance pieces that elude easy description. Through the 1970’s and ‘80’s, her Tanztheatre Wuppertal was renowned for surreal, evocative productions combining intense, elemental emotions with equally elemental stage settings. Her dancers didn’t just glide over a stage—they cavorted with dirt, water, rocks, even ice. Bausch’s method could be as ineffable as her themes; one dancer interviewed by Wenders recalls the only direction she received in twenty years under her was “Get crazier.” (Other, equally Delphic pronouncements included “Go on searching” and “Dance for love.”) However she did it, in classic pieces like Rite of Spring (1975) and Café Müller (1978) Bausch went places that don’t have names, dancing on the edge of a razor between exaltation and chaos.
Film and dance have a long history together, but the marriage is not necessarily a natural one. A movie can record an impression of movement, but at the cost of the physicality that gives a live performance its scale, its special electricity. Wenders made Pina to be seen in 3D, but I saw it sans glasses, and didn’t really miss it. His most effective move, rather, lies in breaking Bausch’s work loose from the confines of the theatre, taking it out into forests, tunnels, trams, factories, escalators and other ordinary locations. By making the “where” as interesting here as the “what”, Wenders renders Pina into a true collaboration.
Alas, the collaboration turned out to only one-way: two days before filming was set to begin in 2009, Bausch died suddenly at the age of 68. The shock of that sudden loss inflects everything in the film. Most obviously, it makes Pina into a valedictory in which her genius is showcased, but her humanity is obscured. Nobody could have produced works of such demanding precision without stepping on a few toe-shoes—to “get crazier” necessarily must have led her to some dark places. Wenders is understandably loathe to suggest ill of the dead, but a real documentary should not have been. A bit too much of this film has her former collaborators sitting in dejected silence, unable to fathom that she is gone.
Indeed, there were quite a few moments in Pina when I was perplexed or bored. If dance on film can never get any deeper for you than the “When You’re a Jet” number in West Side Story, this may not be the trip for you. But there are also many passages of ravishing, oblique beauty, like the bastard spawn of Julie Taymor and Tarsim Singh. Bausch’s personal search may be over, but at least we still have the snapshots she sent back.
© 2012 Nicholas Nicastro
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