PINA – A film for Pina Bausch by Wim Wenders

Posted by Fabio 4 April 2011

PINA is a feature-length dance film in 3D with the ensemble of the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, featuring the unique and inspiring art of the great German choreographer, who died in the summer of 2009. Director Win Wenders takes the audience on a sensual, visually stunning journey of discovery into a new dimension: straight onto the stage with the legendary ensemble and follows the dancers out of the theatre into the city and the surrounding areas of Wuppertal – the place, which for 35 years was the home.

After the sudden death of Pina Bausch in the summer of 2009 – in the middle of joint preparations before shooting – Wim Wenders, after a period of mourning and reflection, had to rethink and start again with his film about and with Pina Bausch. The result was a film for Pina Bausch. Using the choreographies which had been jointly selected – ‘Café Müller’, ‘Le Sacre du printemps’, ‘Vollmond’ and ‘Kontakthof’, – and using some images and audio files of her life as well as 3D recordings of individual ensemble members of the Tanztheater Wuppertal who in spring of 2010 danced personal memories of the precise, critical and loving nature of their great mentor. During more than 20 years of personal friendship, Wim Wenders and Pina Bausch never lost sight of their idea to make a dance film together. But only now, with the latest possibilities created by digital 3D technology, did Wenders find the aesthetic means to bring the unique plasticity and emotional expressiveness of Pina Bausch’s innovative Tanztheater to the cinema screen. Only now can the dimension of the space be reproduced in the cinema. It is this dimension in which movement and dance take place, and into which the new 3D cinema can take the viewer on a sensual journey of discovery.

WIM WENDERS ABOUT PINA BAUSCH

INVENTOR OF A NEW ART FORM

No, there was no hurricane that swept across the stage,
there were just … people performing
who moved differently then I knew
and who moved me as I had never been moved before.
After only a few moments I had a lump in my throat,
and after a few minutes of unbelieving amazement
I simply let go of my feelings
and cried unrestrainedly.
This had never happened to me before…
maybe in life, sometimes in the cinema,
but not when watching a rehearsed production,
let alone choreography.
This was not theatre, nor pantomime,
nor ballet and not at all opera.
Pina is, as you know,
the creator of a new art.
Dance theatre.

MOVEMENT

Until now movement as such has never touched me.
I always regarded it as a given.
One just moves. Everything moves.
Only through Pina’s Tanztheater have I learned to value
movements, gestures, attitudes, behaviour, body language,
and through her work learned to respect them.
And anew every time when, over the years I saw Pina’s pieces, many times and again,
did I relearn, often like being struck by thunder,
that the simplest and most obvious is the most moving at all:
What treasure lies within our bodies, to be able to express itself without words,
and how many stories can be told without saying a single sentence.

PINA In UK cinemas 22 April 2011.

www.pina-film.de