Pina (2011)

Wim Wenders documentary on the work of the German choreographer (and his personal friend) Pina Bausch. One of the most amazing films I’ve seen all year, pretty much due to the amazingness of the pieces themselves - Wenders’ concern was the insoluble problem of how to make a dance film that was even more impactful and immersive than going to see a live performance at the theatre, and having solved it, got himself out of the way.

Pina Bausch died of a sudden illness just before filming was to start, so what was originally intended as a tour documentary became a tribute. But there’s no biographical detail at all, and rather little footage of Pina herself. Instead, Wenders created context by interviewing the dancers in her troupe, some of whom had collaborated with her and each other for decades. These passages are still portraits, essentially - person sitting quietly in chair, looking at camera - overlaid with audio snippets of their reminiscences (charmingly, each seems to have been interviewed in the language they felt most comfortable in: not only German, but English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Korean…). Classic storytelling technique, that; defining the shape of a missing person by filling in their surroundings. I’ve used it myself. XD;

Then there are the performances. They are really ~*dramatic*~. In interview Wenders said that what had originally impressed him about Pina Bausch’s work was that he’d thought he was good at “speaking” body language, being a filmmaker, but she made him realize he was a rookie. The gestural vocabulary of her pieces is so refined that one’s primate brain (or whatever it is that reacts instinctively to the sight of another monkey spotting a leopard) is triggered long before language centers can get it together enough to name the emotion, let alone formulate a narrative context to which it logically belongs. There does seem to be narrative, mostly, but it’s like directly perceiving the ebb-and-flow of the structure underlying the text in the author’s mind (we had a conversation about this at one point). I can only go at them by pointing to similarly-feeling texts. Le Sacre du printemps, for instance, is a Cortázar-esque primitive-symbolist nightmare, whereas Cafe Muller is more like a Tennessee Williams stage tragedy. Of course, due to time considerations you don’t get to see more than extracts, which is frustrating. I would readily watch each one from beginning to end; that would have been worth my $16.50. If Wenders is kind he’ll edit them in their entirety for the DVD.