AFI 2011: PINA

Ditta Miranda Jasifi in Pina.

Moving beyond death

By Ed Rampell

German director Wim Wenders’ Pina is full of filmic flights of whimsy. Wenders, of course, has directed highly regarded features, such as Paris, Texas, but he has also helmed the nonfiction Cuban concert pic, The Buena Vista Social Club. At Pina’s first AFI Film Festival screening Wenders told the audience that it took him a long time to make this documentary because “I didn’t know how to do justice to Pina” Bausch, the choreographer and guru of the Tanztheater Wuppertal.

After grappling with this aesthetic dilemma for 20 years, the return to prominence of the 3D process solved Wenders’ creative conundrum because he was now able to render the plasticity of dance. But just as he was about to commence making the doc Bausch suddenly died, leaving Wenders in the lurch, again. However, her dancers urged him to “make the film for Pina,” and after a few years he did shoot the film, which is a testament to her remarkable talent and personality.

The result is a work that alternates between visual splendor and repetitiousness, as the Tanztheater Wuppertal dancers reflect on their fallen instructor and perform a variety of modern dances set to classical, jazz and other music. Many of the routines are a treat to behold, such as the opening rendition of much of Igor Stravinsky’s jarring The Rite of Spring. Some of the dances are full of wit and are sort of choreographed physical comedy a la Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton or Jacques Tati. Others have monotonous movements and are boring to sit through as the Pina-heads perform the same motions over and over again.

Wenders makes great use of Wuppertal, located in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, east of Düsseldorf, where Pina’s Tanztheater is located. There are great shots of and in a moving overhead monorail that looks like it came straight out of Fritz Lang’s classic sci fi silent film, Metropolis, that expertly utilize the 3D technique. A hallmark of 3D technology is that objects are tossed straight at the camera -- such as flaming spears in the 1950s potboiler, Drums of Tahiti -- to jar and remind auds that they are watching three dimensional imagery. Wenders attains this effect with leaves scattered by a leaf blower, splashing water, billowing curtains and sometimes with dancers who seem to be defying gravity, but he hasn’t completely mastered this complex medium yet.

The performers are multi-culti and multi-generational -- one female hoofer comments on the fact that Bausch continued working with dancers 40 and over -- and they often prance, romp and leap to and fro in revealing outfits. In The Rite of Spring number the women’s tops cling to their nipples and they lift filmy skirts to reveal their panties; in another set piece a male dancer literally drops his drawers as he dances from one female to another. It seems to me that Pina’s choreography expressed a yearning to be liberated, to overcome restraints, and that her work included an erotic dimension along these lines.

Pina has no plot, some dialogue, and is mainly for fans of modern dance, 3D and/or Wenders. It is Germany's Official Foreign-Language Oscar Submission and part of the AFI Film Festival’s Special Screenings section.