"How can we know the dancer from the dance?" --William Butler Yeats
"It appears to be monumental only because it's art." -- Christo
Choreographer Pina Bausch is unknown to me. This isn't surprising. Of all the arts, dance is the one about which I know the least. So for me walking into Wim Wenders's new film about her was walking into terra incognito. I like seeing unfamiliar things in movies, actually. Show me something new and I am content. Or as another choreographer, Serge Diaghilev, once implored Jean Cocteau: "Astonish me."
Wenders's film, Pina (2011), acts as a eulogy and as a celebration of the choreographer. Pina died in 2009, shortly before the film commenced filming. Wenders assembles Pina's dance company and re-stages key performances and mostly gets out of the way, though not entirely. He interrupts an opening movement of The Rite of Spring with jarring cutaways to footage of the choreographer herself when it might have been wiser to let the dance itself play on. It mostly smooths itself out thereafter. This isn't a complete document of her various productions, after all, so all of the productions in the film are necessarily truncated in some way.
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