Pina Bausch was one of the most iconic and influential European dance makers of the past 40 years. She often polarised people, but the dance language she created is some of the most frequently referenced by contemporary choreographers. In Wim Wender's film Pina, the audience is uniquely positioned for an immersive experience. As always in film, the director dictates audience perspective, but the use of 3D stereographics places the audience amid the dance and has the dancers performing, pleading, beckoning to the individual audience member. This lends a sense not just of reality but of hyperreality to the viewing experience. Because the technology produces at once a heightened sense of reality and of artificiality, it works well in conveying that duality in dance performance.
In Pina, Wenders allows the dance to speak for itself. Extended excerpts from four works are used to form the basis of the film. These are combined with sparse comments about Pina Bausch from company members. The dance was filmed at live performances and in and around the city of Wuppertal. Hence, it is possible to experience the sets and performance quality of the works as they are staged within the theatre context and also to experience the places from which Pina Bausch took her inspiration.
The film also allows us to remember and appreciate how raw, at times confronting and inventive, Pina Bausch's dance making was. Three of the works used in the film are from the 1970s: Rite of Spring, Cafe Muller and Kontakthof, and yet they still have real impact and startle with the intensity of the movement vocabulary invented and exploited by Bausch. Violent, repetitive phrases are often used which are both poignant but almost comically slap-stick in their broadness. The moment in Cafe Muller comes to mind where a woman is repeatedly dropped like a sack of potatoes from a man's arms, only to scramble desperately to her feet and hurl herself back at him. This is a powerful dance phrase in itself but its relentless repetition makes it almost unbearably painful to watch and yet ridiculous in its seemingly mindless recapitulations. As does the man's complete passivity and lack of involvement. There are also wonderful contrasts in some of the partnered work where one of the couple (usually the man), moves frenetically in order to propel his partner along, while she is inert, almost catatonic.
Pina works well as a dance documentary and is enhanced by the use of 3D. The film commenced shooting shortly after the sudden death of Pina Bausch in 2009. It was always intended as a collaboration between Bausch and Wenders. Pina Bausch wanted Wenders to find a way to preserve her work. Wenders spent years searching for a way to "break down the invisible wall between dance and film", and wanted to "make a film about her eyes". It seems that they both succeeded. In the end it is the dance that is the star of this film, rendered as it is by a director who understands and loves the artist he is depicting.
- SUSAN BENDALL