Pina (2011)

Best movie of this year hands down!

Awesome Movie

Admirable film.

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

I saw Wim Wenders' «Pina – Dance, Dance, Otherwise We Are Lost» after watching the fine documentary «The Salt of the Earth (A Journey with Sebastião Salgado)» (which he made three years later), and the inversion proved disappointing. When Pina Bausch died unexpectedly, without the dancer and choreographer by his side (as he projected the film since the 1980s), the end result is only fair. I do not know why Wenders thought that 3D could be the "solution" to film dance, when in the past this performing manifestation has been registered in more than adequate ways, without relying much on visual technology: for instance, Norman McLaren made his shorts «Narcissus» and «Pas de deux» with less resources, just as Carlos Saura did «Bodas de sangre», without diminishing the beauty of dance or making its filming less effective. In the end, the majority of living beings who will watch «Pina» will do so in two dimensions. On the other hand, I did not see the need to move the choreographies to exteriors, sometimes in ugly locations (a quarry, for example, or the urban streets with signs of drug stores, lottery or the "big M"), when the best images and moments are those registered in sets of ambitious (and achieved) expressiveness, decorated with few elements, as the sets for «Le sacre du printemps», «Café Müller» and «Vollmond». Beautiful testimonies by Bausch's dancers, come from all corners of the world, and the choreographies rescue this documentary, which goes on for 100 minutes that sometimes seemed endless to me. Yet I would not tell anyone not to see Wender's film: more for dance reasons than for cinematic value, «Pina» is a registry of the work of a great artist, of a daughter of two centuries. It deserves to be recommended, the more so because there are many persons who will enjoy it to the fullest.

Reading some the interviews that Wim Wenders gave about Pina I learned that this film ended to be something quite different from what the director originally intended. While fascinated a long time by Pina Bausch's creation and especially Cafe Muller, Wenders could not find for a long time the appropriate means of expression to make a film about it. And then something happened - technology developed and 3D came back with a revenge. The revelation was that 3D and filmed dancing are a perfect fit. The result is a film which is unique in its way, hard to enter in any category, a good example actually of how relative and futile categories are.What we get on screen is a portrait and a homage to Pina Bausch. While Wim Wenders authored many documentaries about music or history of cinema, this film is not the usual documentary, neither is it a biography (no chronology, no theoretical analysis of her work), but a portrait of an artist who was among the few who revolutionized her discipline, a portrait assembled from testimonies from the dancers who worked with her (although some say no words) and most of all by her art as it was filmed and brought to screen. Maybe the best description I found is the one in the German sub-title of the movie - a Tanzfilm, a Dance Movie.There are indeed a great deal of beautifully filmed ballet scenes, in different environments, and here we see the hand of a master director, as almost all required innovation in building the sets and making them look like belonging to a cinema event, not to a filmed performance. As I am a fervent spectator of filmed performances of contemporary dance on Mezzo TV especially, I am pretty familiar with the genre. Wenders succeeds here to work the synthesis, and Pina is both a ballet performance of first class and a cinema event combining the best of the two arts and amplifying it by the power of 3D. The usage of the technology results not only in viewers seeing better and more clearly the performance and the sets (these too), but also making them part of the creative process. In several scenes in the film we see Pina Bausch during repetitions mixing with the dancers, watching and talking with them, working together as a team. With the 3D effect the spectators become part of the work process, part of the show, part of the homage Wenders brings to the great choreographer.

This film did not really click with me. The dance style is like a pending apocalypse. It becomes very dreary sometimes. One wants to yell "Lighten up – have a drink!" Some excerpts brought to mind Monty Python – a woman dancing on a bench in a stream (And now for Something Completely....).There is hardly any exuberance and joy expressed in the dance sequences. Even when the music is bubbly, the dancers seem to have a forced smile.Perhaps it was too avant garde for my taste as well – in one arrangement a dancer is shoveling dirt unto another dancer, in another a dancer performing by a public pool. It all comes off as not only pretentious – but cold and icy. Many of the dancers expostulate rapturously on Pina – but I also got the feeling of someone who was not communicating effectively and hard to reach. Overall I was not impressed. Some of the musical pieces were interesting (The Rite of Spring by Stravinski), but the choreography overwhelmed the rigid dancing.

I've seen some plays of Pina's work and also heard about her in my drama classes, thus I decided to watch this movie to better understand her life, her achievements, in short, to know her better. From the beginning to the end I was shocked, nothing say about her personal life, she barely appear in the movie, however I could completely understand her, I emulate her dance, I dance with the art, I dance with the feelings, I spent all the time there, following her passion. During the scenes her dance partners spoke about her and I could see her strength and, mostly, her beliefs. She truly believed in her acts, she believed with so much passion and with freedom that we certainly finish the movie flying,our minds creativity boiling and our body exhausted, freely. If you are reading this review is because you considered to watch this movie...just one advice: Go with passion!