3-D takes ‘Pina’ to perfection

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Ditta Miranda Jasjfi dances “Vollmond,” a Pina Bausch creation that’s performed in a stream of water onstage. The work is featured in Wim Wenders’ 3-D documentary “Pina.”

‘PINA’

Sony Pictures Classics presents a film directed by Wim Wenders. Running time: 103 minutes. Rated PG (for sensuality/partial nudity and smoking). Opening Friday.

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Updated: February 16, 2012 8:03AM

In a sense, Wim Wenders’ films have always been about lives in motion. In his Road Movie Trilogy of the 1970s, that motion took the form of aimless, elemental wandering by a variety of lost souls. In other films, it was more specific: The beautiful but lonely trapeze artist in “Wings of Desire” who spun from a rope, or the tiny Cuban girl in “Buena Vista Social Club” who grinned with unadulterated delight as she moved to the seductive sounds in a Havana dance studio.

But in his latest work, “Pina,” Wenders has made what might very well be the most extraordinary dance film created to date. It is an astonishing, altogether masterful 3-D documentary about the German choreographer Pina Bausch (1940-2009), whose powerful blend of dance and theater brought the art of German Expressionism into the late 20th and early 21st century and became a major influence on both modern dance and stage direction and design.

“Pina,” which opens Friday at AMC River East and Evanston Century, does not simply capture dance as the subject of a story (as in “The Red Shoes” or “The Turning Point”), or as spectacle (as in everything from the Busby Berkeley movies of the 1930s, to the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers dance-a-thons, to the more contemporary work of Bob Fosse and his followers). Instead, Wenders has found a way to suggest what it feels like to be inside a dancer’s body — to breathe and walk and jump and pivot and at times even hit the floor, to move from the wings onto the stage, or simply to dance en plein air. He also has explored how Bausch plumbed the inner lives of the remarkable dancers of her Tanztheater Wuppertal company, and shaped her dances from the most basic physical and emotional impulses and rhythms generated between and among them.

The irony of all this is that Wenders, now 66, had little interest in dance until he encountered Bausch’s work in 1985, two years before he made “Wings of Desire.”

“My first encounter with her work was a performance by her company in Venice of a double bill of ‘The Rite of Spring’ [that primal fertility ritual set to the Stravinsky score], and ‘Cafe Muller’ [one of Bausch’s most important early works, inspired by her memories of growing up in the restaurant and hotel run by her parents],” said Wenders, who spent several days in Chicago this past October when “Pina” was screened as part of the Chicago International Film Festival.

“It was a life-changing experience. I was someone who had not been touched by dance and didn’t think it was fun. It was an aesthetic world I didn’t really care about. But that first night blew me away. I wept through the entire performance. ‘Cafe Muller’ showed me more about men and women in 40 minutes than anything in the entire history of cinema. It took me a long time to recover from that evening. And I really made this film not for people who know Pina’s work so much as for people who were like me before that night of dance.”

Wenders met Bausch the very next morning and immediately talked to her about making a film of her work in 3-D.

“There was something unbelievably knowing about her,” he recalled. “She had those ‘seeing everything’ eyes. But there was little response to my idea. Then we met in Wuppertal [the German industrial city that’s home to her company, and is known for its steep slopes, extensive green spaces, a dramatic monorail system and the manufacture of Bayer aspirin, all but the latter captured in Wenders’ film]. And she asked me: ‘What about your idea for a movie?’

“So I went to her rehearsals, and saw how she worked, and how she was seeking not technical perfection but total emotional honesty. I was amazed at how she looked at things. I wanted to find the language that would be right for preserving her dances on film, because dance is such an ephemeral art and video is not an ideal way to preserve it.”

Wenders followed her company all over the world — to Rome and Lisbon, to New York and Los Angeles. And he watched as Bausch, whom choreographer Paul Taylor once described as “one of the thinnest human beings I’ve ever seen,” pushed harder and harder.

“The truth is, I would have made this movie much earlier had I known how to do it,” Wenders confessed. “But it took me 20 years. That’s because early 3-D, like that used by Alfred Hitchcock in ‘Dial M for Murder,’ had a problem of synchronicity. It wouldn’t have captured the elegance of Pina’s dances. Then, in 2008, I happened to see ‘U2-3D,’ the concert film of the rock band that was the first live-action digital film shot in 3-D. I realized that the right technology finally existed. Before that I felt like I was watching the aquarium and not swimming with the fish. Now, this new language put me in the water. I called Pina from the movie theater and told her about it.”

Wenders and Bausch made plans, and she scheduled an upcoming season that would include performances of “The Rite of Spring” (in which the entire stage is covered with earth), “Cafe Muller” (something of an impassioned madhouse scenario), “Vollmond” (or “Full Moon,” in which there is a stream of water onstage), and “Kontakhof” (a sort of universal prom night for many ages and personalities). By early 2009, with a half year’s worth of pre-production already done, Wenders was ready to go. But then on June 30, just two days before a planned 3-D rehearsal shoot, Bausch, who Wenders said, “always looked exhausted, worked too hard and smoked too much,” died. She had been diagnosed with cancer just five days earlier.

“It was unimaginable,” said Wenders. “None of her friends or dancers had a chance to say goodbye. She just disappeared.”

Ultimately, the decision was made to continue on without Pina. And what was meant to be a collaboration with the choreographer became a stunning homage that bursts with life as her company performs Bausch’s piece on theater stages, as well as in nature, at an abandoned steel mill, near a quarry, in a sleek modernist home and beneath the Wuppertal monorail.

“I thought it was important to show the everyday life of the city where Pina had worked for so many years,” said Wenders.

And gradually the dancers opened up to the filmmaker, too, and talked about themselves and Bausch. These “interviews” are strewn throughout the movie along with bits of archival footage of the choreographer that capture her quiet but fearsome intensity.

“Pina’s company is still going strong,” said Wenders. “This summer at the Sadler’s Wells theater, as part of the London Cultural Olympics, they will dance 10 of her works inspired by stays in cities around the world. But it is hard to see who will take on this burden over time. It’s a dilemma.”

“Pina” is Germany’s submission to the Academy Awards for best foreign language film, and it’s also on the Oscars’ short list for best documentary. Now that it has been released, Wenders is on to his next 3-D film projects.

“One is about architecture — in Berlin and China and Brasilia and Chicago. The other is a fictional story, also told with this new technology, but used in a more intimate way.”