Dance in the Round
Pina (2011) is a stunning film, especially in 3D. Directed by Wim Wenders, it presents dance in the round, but even better than on stage–closer, more intimate, and with a roving camera that seems animated with its own intelligence. I can't but think that films like this will revolutionize how we watch dance, which has such a relatively small audience in the U.S. that it could really benefit from a proliferation of HD and 3D films, as opera has.
The film begins with repetition: a Mardi-Gras-esque conga line of company dancers weaves its way through various sets throughout the film, making the same patterns of hand gestures over and over. This flexible line unifies the film, as do the dancers themselves whom we get to hear in individual interviews. Choreographer Pina Bausch has introduced these gestures at the very beginning, tying them to the seasons, but Pina explains little in the film. Her choreography tends to speak for itself, though the occasions when we see her dancing roles she originated are very moving.
Wenders takes advantage of the repetitive vocabulary of dance forms to structure his film, insofar as it is structured at all. The line of dancers recurs, as the camera zooms into pairs of dancers and out again for broad shots of dancers lining an auditorium wall in Chorus Line fashion. These dancers advance and retreat as the camera does, taking full advantage of the 3D technology to fill the imaginary space as much as the literal space in the room. The risk in repetition, of course, is boredom, but to my taste the dance of choreography and cinematography here precludes that. There is always something interesting to watch on screen, even if the blank-faced interviews with each dancer reveal little about Pina's work. Wenders undercuts our expectations of documentary by making those interviews particularly unhelpful. All the action is on stage, or in the beautifully contrived spaces that count as stages in Pina's work, as below.
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