The Latest at Goethe

He had to be dragged into his first piece by Pina Bausch. Now, Wim Wenders has memorialized the artist with his film Pina. On the Goethe-Institut’s invitation he is presenting the film to the Australian audience in Sydney. In the interview, the film director talks about 3D, dance and mourning.

Let’s be honest, Mr. Wenders, for how long did you believe that 3D was merely a whimsical gimmick for Hollywood’s blockbuster directors?

To be perfectly honest, never! I got a glimpse of the new 3D digital technology in 2007 with a forerunner, the concert film U2 in 3D, and I was excited from the very first moment. Not because the film knocked me out – technically it was still quite rudimentary and I knew the music well enough – but because I perceived that something was happening here! At that time no blockbusters had yet been shot in 3D; this new language was still purely an assertion, more a wish than a tangible promise. But it was enough for me. Here, at least, was the answer to my long-asked question of how to put the art of Pina Bausch in a fundamentally different way – a more suitable one – onto the screen. This could work! This big door that opened up the space on the screen. Yet, it’s true that the big studios usurped this technology – it’s firstly a question of money – and that they then couldn’t do more than produce “gimmicks,” or better, a new main attraction. As such, this new language was enough for them. They could earn lots of money with it alone, with the haunted house effects.

Does filming in three dimensions fundamentally alter the work of a director or do you not notice the new technology until you see the finished product – like the new sound possibilities with stereo or Dolby Surround?

If 3D does not fundamentally change something about the work, from the very beginning, then you haven’t really put your mind to it or are doing something altogether wrong. We don’t produce for the screen anymore! It doesn’t even exist anymore. Instead, you look through it to the horizon and things can even be located in front of the screen. The screen has really become a window. A human being no longer has a two-dimensional physical surface, but volume, an aura. You enter into the space in the truest sense of the word. To do that well, you need to do some, shall we say, “space research.” And you need to understand something about the physiology of how two eyes see spatially and how two cameras can imitate this as well as possible. Otherwise, 3D can get on your nerves, or should I say on your eyes. We attempted to create a very natural feeling of space, not any razzle-dazzle.



Are you now “hooked”?

That’s one way of putting it! It is difficult, if not impossible, to turn back now. We’ve only just scratched the surface; we haven’t even begun to tell a story.

Where do you see the future of 3D film?

In those places in particular where it hasn’t yet been used; in documentary film and in independent filmmaking, in authors’ film. It is now a permanent fixture in animated films and blockbuster cinema. But, it’s in those areas that 3D is not used for its true quality: to see the world a different way and take the viewers along into the lives or the working realities of other people.

You like to make portraits of artists. Before the Wuppertal dance theatre you filmed the Buena Vista Social Club, Wolfgang Niedecken, your blues heroes, Yohji Yamamoto. Where did you get this idiosyncrasy?

I think there is hardly any more exciting field on this planet where (almost) everything has been discovered than human creativity. Real adventures and surprises are still possible there.

Are they perhaps in a certain way also self-portraits – a look at kindred spirits?

Hm. Actually, the most exciting part is discovering someone else, not one’s self. When you shoot feature films and tell stories, you draw them from inside yourself, divulge something of yourself, you dis-cover. In documentary film, I am interested in just the opposite: in finding something that is not myself.

Or is there a musician hiding inside you trying to escape? After all, it is usually about music.

I love music more than anything. Many kinds of music. Nothing has saved me or inspired me as often as music. Without blues and rock music, I would never have gained access to my own creativity, never had the confidence to do anything. In my music films, I have often just wanted to memorialize my favourite musicians, or to give something back to them. And we must never forget, if you really like something, or love something more than anything else you are able to talk about it in a very different way. You want it to be shown in the best light. That is a good attitude, I think, for making a documentary film: to do something the honour.

How was it with Pina Bausch? When did you first have the idea of collaborating? And which of the two of you had the idea?

I started it, in my youthful foolishness and full of the greatest awe when I first saw Pina’s work. That was in 1985, in Venice at a retrospective held there for Pina. I let myself be dragged into a piece by the dance theatre. “Do I have to!? I’m really not into dance.” Ten minutes into Café Müller I was sitting on the edge of my chair, weeping waterworks and I knew: I have never seen anything so prodigious. Nothing on a stage had ever touched me like that, had ever hit me that hard. Over the following days I saw all of the other pieces that were played there and was lucky enough to meet Pina herself. At our first meeting I was already talking about a film that the two of us simply had to make someday. Pina didn’t respond, just smiled mysteriously and lit up another cigarette. Did she even hear me? Was that presumptuous of me? I wasn’t sure. But the next time we saw each other, one or two years later, Pina said without any prompting: “You were talking about a film. Were you serious?” And gradually Pina became the more driving force...

Actually the film was intended as a joint work by you and Pina Bausch. But, just as it was supposed to begin, Pina Bausch passed away quite suddenly. Later, you and the dancers decided to make a film anyway. What was the impetus for this?

Most of all that it became clear to me how very much Pina wished that we would find a different filmic language for the pieces she had chosen, that they would be “in good hands,” as Pina put it. You need to remember that dance theatre is a very fragile, ephemeral thing. A piece only exists when it is performed. It cannot be written down and played by another ensemble. Over the course of time Pina produced 40 pieces! And besides a new piece that she did every year, she also had kept her entire repertoire, all forty of them, alive; constantly performed them again, cast them anew, practiced them anew, to keep these pieces alive. That was a real Sisyphean task. That was also Pina’s main concern for our film: that we would find a language that was suitable for her pieces making us able to record them in a valid way. This only seemed possible for me with 3D. Only then could I with my camera be at eye level, enter the dancers’ own realm, their element, space. When, a few months after Pina’s death, the dancers began to rehearse these pieces that Pina had set on the programme for the film, I realized that it would be unforgivable not to be part of it. We just had to be open to a different film! We could no longer make the film with Pina, but we could make one for Pina. That, then, was our mutual resolve.

So, the film became a way for you and the dancers to mourn her passing? What significance did the audience have in this?

Yes, it was a way of grieving. But, not all of it was sad. Pina laughed a lot and loved to laugh and she certainly created her lightest pieces in her hardest times. We took that as our example. The audience? Everything was made for them; it was for them that Pina set her maxim: “We must dance!” To show the audience something, to show them what power, indeed even healing power, lies in the language of the body. Pina was the one who brought dance down from the classical Olympus of ballet and gave it back to humanity as something that belongs to them, not just to model athletes. In Pina’s work no idealized figures dance, but real people: fat and thin, short and tall, young and old.

Who does the film address primarily? Those who want to remember her or those who have never seen a performance by Pina Bausch?

My target group is everyone who thinks dance is not their thing. I was one of them until Pina taught me otherwise. The film has been running now for weeks very successfully in Germany and now also in France and most of the audience has never had the privilege of seeing a live piece by Pina.

Didn’t you also attempt a little of the impossible with “Pina”: to hold onto something that can only exist in the moment?

In cinema that is not impossible! I also thought for a long time that cinema was invented to show the visible things. “Film is the saviour of reality.” But then one day I realized that film can do far more: it can make the invisible visible.

Most Germans associate Wuppertal with an elephant that fell out of the elevated railway and wouldn’t be caught dead there. For you, as a native of Düsseldorf, the city is more familiar. Also a large part of your feature film “Alice in the Cities” was shot there. Was this mutual reference to the city of Wuppertal important for “Pina”?

It is a city with very enchanting features that is underestimated for quite unjustifiable reasons. More inventions originated in Wuppertal than anywhere else. It was once a wealthy city. Not until the second half of the 20th century did Wuppertal suffer the same fate as many other traditional industrial cities. But merely the elevated railway! A marvellous means of transport. Built the same year as the Eiffel Tower! It even looks as if someone had taken the tower apart and erected it again lengthwise. For a 3D camera there’s no better means of transport than to float through a city with a free view below.

The film is now celebrating its Australian premiere at the Festival of German Films. Do you think the response here will differ from that in Germany? Is Pina Bausch universally understandable?

I think that hardly any other film is as universally understandable. That is because of Pina’s art. She gave us our most original language back: the language of the body. With tremendous zest for life and with a tremendous wealth of forms. What, in the truest sense of the term, could be more generally understandable?

Pina Bausch was not a woman of many words. How would she have let you know that she was satisfied with your film?

With a smile. Just a look would have sufficed. Pina’s eyes told everything that she so dreaded putting into words.

-db-