Film Tips

Wim Wenders has made a film tribute to dance choreographer Pina Bausch and a homage to her city, Wuppertal. A success story.

They look like a couple who have succumbed to the puppet theatre’s charm. Dominique Mercy and Malou Airaudo are bending over the model of the Wuppertal stages where things are coming to life. The camera zooms in and the stage events fill the screen. Mercy is artistic director at the Tanztheater Wuppertal and Airaudo teaches dance at the Folkwang Academy. They belong to the original company founded by Pina Bausch in 1973 at the invitation of the then artistic director, the venturesome Arno Wüstenhöfer. Thus, Mercy and Airaudo helped to make the myth embracing the dance theatre and its director.

Cut. Men and women are goose-stepping over a slag heap, dancing a Polonaise that the infinitely imaginative Pina Bausch was constantly composing anew in her pieces. This is reminiscent of Die Klage der Kaiserin (The Plaint of the Empress) (1989), the only film Pina Bausch ever made with her ensemble, filmed in the woods and fields around wintery Wuppertal. The dancers are wearing their characteristically sardonic smile, yet their Polonaise is also a dance macabre. They all speak in the film, one after the other. They speak about Pina Bausch and how they experienced her. And the further the film progresses, the more it sounds like a many-voiced preface to a hagiography.

„Pina“ without Pina

What does a filmmaker do when his protagonist dies? It may be assumed that when Pina Bausch died unexpectedly on 30 June 2009 of the cancer that had been diagnosed just five days earlier, Wim Wenders was initially at a loss to know what to do. Should he carry on anyway, even though they had been planning to make the film together? Wim Wenders called the film Pina and presents his protagonist in the irrealis mood. Pina is to be seen in an interview excerpt, a now far-distant image watched by dancers whose heads are shown from behind, as if they were at the cinema.

Wenders uses film within film and theatre within theatre as a means of alienation. The most important medium he uses to set much of what happens in a sphere that is almost out of this world is also the latest technical coup: 3-D. Wenders was the first to use this technology artistically rather than in an action film. It won him the German Documentary Award 2011 and the German Film Award for Best Documentary Film.

Universally tangible through 3-D

Experiencing dance three-dimensionally at the cinema at last seemed to be quite a major achievement as previously there had not been any satisfactory solution to the problems of presenting dance on film. Either the subjective camera was right there among the dancers, which meant you could not see much of the choreography. Or the camera remained at a distance and inevitably could do no more than present what looked like an anthill.

The relevant film critics gave rave reviews. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung‘s critic even claimed that in using 3-D, Wim Wenders had reinvented himself. The genuine dance critics who wrote about Pina were a minority and were surprised that the film was by no means a 1:1 copy of Bausch’s creative work or of her personality. More than a few people who were acquainted with Pina Bausch’s oeuvre expressed their disappointment. “But that isn’t Pina!“ protested cultural journalist and filmmaker Anne Linsel, who worked with Pina Bausch and made two films about her.

She is right. The film is Wim Wenders. He does not even attempt to give a chronological account of Pina Bausch’s life or to document or analyse her work. That is something Klaus Wildenhahn did in his documentary Was tun Pina Bausch und ihre Tänzer in Wuppertal? (What are Pina Bausch and her dancers doing in Wuppertal?) back in 1982. Nor did Wenders attempt to capture and preserve anything of the atmosphere at rehearsals or performances during Bausch’s lifetime. That was something Chantal Akerman did back in 1983 in Un jour Pina a demandé – an unmatched achievement.

An obituary

Wim Wenders has made an obituary to a woman whose genius he respected, transforming her into an angel as he did years ago in Der Himmel über Berlin. After about two hours, we see Pina Bausch doing a solo dance. At the end of it, she waves, as if from a distance. She appears in 3 D to rise out of space into a deep black nowhere, a place far removed from the everyday world of theatre and performance where her dances are now being played out. Pina begins by abruptly pushing one into this strange reality. It shows the beginning of her version of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. One submits to the illusion of being touched by a piece of material swirling around right in front of one. One stomps into an artificial realm of death along with the dancers, into cold nothingness, where the dancers are dancing for their lives, very close and yet untouchably distant. The red dress draped around the dancer, for example, enabling her to slip into the role of a victim, initially appears as it lies on the ground to be an artificially shining object. Wenders uses 3-D to give this archaic, elementally forceful piece a new, entirely immaterial dimension.

In contrast to the breathtakingly designed artefact are the scenes showing the dancers in the streets of Wuppertal. In order to avoid indecorous naturalism here, too, however, their voices come from offstage. Pina, Wim Wenders’ declaration of love for Wuppertal, a follow-up to Alice in den Städten (Alice in the Cities) of 1974, has no need for fictional characters. And Helena Pikon is now dancing Pina Bausch’s role in Café Müller which she rehearsed for 15 years, apparently to no avail. She, like the others, is a trustee who is carrying out Pina’s mission, as cited in the film’s subtitle: Dance, dance, otherwise you are lost.