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Flicks - Pina Wim Wenders' strange and beautiful tribute to the German choreographer Pina Bausch challenges our conceptions of dance. by Chris Dashiell - The Film Snob Pina is a tribute to the late German choreographer Pina Bausch, who died in 2009 at the age of 68. It's directed by Wim Wenders, a longtime fan of Pina's who will himself be forever remembered for his 1987 masterpiece Wings of Desire. Unlike the average documentary tribute to an artist, the film contains practically no biographical information, no narrator, no talking head interviews. It's a film about her work and her influence on the people she taught, with dances performed by her troupe, The Tanztheater Wuppertal, including excerpts from several of her big dance pieces, along with solo and duet performances that highlight the skills of her amazingly diverse group of dancers. In between these sequences, each dancer is highlighted sitting silently facing the camera, usually accompanied by his or her voice-over talking about Pina. A vision emerges of a woman who seemed to be able to look into a dancer's soul and find the core, and who would push the performers to tap into that core in order to bring the dance alive. "You have to scare me," she told one of the men. To another, one of the women, she said, "You just have to get crazier."
The result is not even what one would expect from the most inventive of modern dance forms. Pina went to the far edge of the avant-garde. A long beginning sequence shows her version of The Rite of Spring, the jagged movements of the dancers taking place on a stage covered with dirt, and as they become dirtier, the piece links sexual relations with a sense of primal fear. A centerpiece is the long work Café Muller, in which men and women enact strange rituals of connection and avoidance in a room full of obstructing chairs and tables. Many themes run through Pina's work—among them the passion of natural forces, the crippling limits of patriarchy, and the illusions of selfhood and performance. Many of the solos and duets take place outside, in the public spaces of Wuppertal, the German city that is home to the troupe. It is both lovely and uncanny to see the dancers' expressive work right next to a city street or in an elevated train.
Pina was interested in seeing dance from different perspectives, so we see older dancers and dancers of various body types. The nationalities and languages range across the globe. She was also very interested in body movement itself as a dramatic expression, so we see movements that might traditionally be considered awkward or not even like dance. The complicated feelings that these pieces, sometimes just fragments, evoke, can be uncomfortable, pushing us outside of the zone of aesthetic distance that we're used to, making us feel involved in the difficulties and conflicts being expressed in the movement.
Wenders puts us right in the middle of things, and the experience becomes hypnotic over the almost two-hour running time. It was shot in 3-D, and screened that way originally, although I can only imagine what that was like, because the current screening I saw was in regular 2-D, but the film still felt like an immersion in a strange and wonderful foreign land. Later I found out that Wenders had originally been planning to do a film with Pina herself, and after her sudden death from cancer, decided to go ahead and create the work as a tribute. I'm grateful that he did that.