It all boils down to the now commonly asked question, do we need another 3D film in theaters?
If you answer yes, you will be disappointed.
Pina Bausch’s life is celebrated with the magnificent direction of Win Wenders, who is best known for directing the Buena Vista Social Club documentary film featuring Cuban musicians who played for the club of the same name during the 1950‘s. For this film, Wenders received an Academy Award nomination for best documentary feature but he is also known for Paris, Texas, and Wings of Desire, among other films.
In Pina he recreates some of the dance routines dancers performed under Pina Bausch’s leadership in the Tanztheater Wuppertal, the place where some critics say modern dance theater was born. With their dancing, they also speak, without words, with such fluidity and passion that only parallels the work of Marcel Marceau or Charlie Chaplin in the same way their bodies became the language or paint.
“She was a painter,” says one of the dancers in the film, and “we were the paint.” With its many dance routines, which sometimes are performed with a full troupe or by a single dancer, Pina talks of fragility, age, seasons, alienation, nature, love and many other subjects in a beautiful visual mix that contrasts dancers against their backgrounds. At the beginning of the film, dancers perform in a world where only sand exists and men and women unite to create life.
After this scene Pina takes the audience to a world of visual language no one had explored in film before. This language was fully explored with every one of the sequences in the film and the way dancers perform and talk through each routine.
In this journey, Pina develops into a postmodern manifestation of life among our industrial world. By juxtaposing bridges, trams, and buildings against dancers longing for their own space, Pina talks of the balance and imbalance of nature against the fragility of life and the trap of modern life. In one of the shortest scenes in the film, a woman, whose face do not see, is chained and longing for freedom. She is trying in vain to free herself by force, then the film subjects the audience to a similar sight when a woman is allegorically buried by another woman, who is wearing business attire.
While Pina’s direction is one of the best in musical-themed contemporary films, with the varied use of angles and camera placement, the visual force of Pina would be greatly diminished had it not been for the excellent choice of music. The film explores every scene with a selection of songs that reinforces the visual content with songs that are as flexible as the dancers are. One scene tricks the audience into believing a woman’s arms are as strong as a man’s. The song absorbs the audience into this visual trick until it is revealed that a man is behind her, the man then moves out of the woman’s foregrounded figure and together engage in a spiral dance that takes place inside a tram’s machinery room, replicating the synergy of the couple with the non-stop action of the tram’s movement. In another scene a man is dancing while a dog is barking at him. The song captures the audience into the play of the man and the dog, who seem to be disconnected but aware of each other. Once again, the film uses powerful imagery to contrast the dance with the surroundings, in this case a banner that mentions in German monetary issues by mentioning the word “dollar.”
Pina’s full use of outdoor scenery is much restricted, but not limited at the end of the film, when Win Wender choreographs an otherwise impossible mix of indoor water theatrics and a full size rock that emphasizes the visual richness an energy of Pina Bausch’s work. Dancers become the energy behind the movement of the water and the reason why it splashes onto the rock. They become the rain and the wind that while merely situated in a stage, creates the same dramatic effect on the audience.
The visual richness of the film is fully explored with great modern dance, Pina Bausch’s choreographies and Win Wender’s choice of 3D visuals that reinforces the depth of Pina Bausch’s work which ironically is the reason why the film was not done before her death. The use of 3D in Pina does not fulfill a marketing scheme to draw moviegoers, but to engage the audience in a world where body is the language, to remind viewers of life and earth in a complex layered foreground background experience, and like Pina Bausch said: “Dance, dance… otherwise we are lost.”
