Wenders 3-Ds Pina Bausch
Framing Wim Wenders’ emotional 3-D tribute to “dance theater” creator Pina Bausch, some of the late choreographer’s most esteemed dancers, young and old, move slowly along a line atop the high horizon line of rolling hills, signing Bausch’s expressions of the seasons passing, over and over. The incanting cortège conjures the image of Guido’s circle of the past on parade in the climax to Fellini’s 8 1/2, adding Wenders’ artistic generosity to Fellini’s sentimental self-indulgence.
Naturally, artificial dimensionality develops dance on screen, advancing the art as surely as avant-garde artifacts of the ’80s such as David Byrne/Twyla Tharp’s The Catherine Wheel and Laurie Anderson’s Home of the Brave. Maybe it took passing from mime to Mummenschanz to get here. Judiciously applying 3-D to dancers within spare, symbolic, sometimes virtual sets, Wenders vivifies the normally flattened movie dance experience, creating an implicit (and explicit) sense of a diorama wherein the spectator has a privileged view of the entire space, vaulting over or passing through the proscenium arch.
Wenders’ modulated pace, minimalist camera movement and tasteful performance selection, coupled with the work of musician-turned-editor Toni Froschhammer and stereographer Alain Derobe, intrigues the eye and excites the imagination.
Those familiar with the modesty of Wenders’ anything-but-didactic fiction will immediately appreciate the companionable qualities of Bausch’s art, particularly in the equipoise between hope and angst, the unmistakably spiritual expressions of existential condition in movies such as Im Laufe der Zeit (Kings of the Road) and excerpts from Bausch’s Café Muller, Le Sacre de Printemps, Vollmond and Kontakthof.
Adding to Wenders’ peculiar timing—working with Nicholas Ray just before his death for Lightning Over Water, and after Michelangelo Antonioni’s debilitating stroke for the glorious Beyond the Clouds—Bausch died in situ, leaving the interpretation to Bausch’s ensemble but ingeniously framing the work as a memorial that summarizes her legacy.
Bausch imagines dancers as park plants in red earth rising up, struggling for turf and withering, illustrating that “life must die to itself.” She captures robotic repetition of overstimulated sexual instinct—from the chin-chuck to the ass-slap—without dehumanizing or denying the embrace. She dresses a male dancer as a ballerina, remarkably, without a trace of titillation or provocation, casting the dilemma against an urban-expressionist backdrop that suggests anomie rather than Weimar decadence. In the preternatural, Wagnerian setting of the Bergisches Land, she pits water against stone and disinters burial rituals that hearken back to Greek drama and create lonely futility.
As Bausch’s dancers—some pointedly past their prime—possess a plaintive, unpretentious quality, Bausch’s Tanztheater supplications are humble offerings of “method” dancing and poetic pleasure. Wenders and Bausch have mastered the art of confident, passionate creation without being combative.
