#1 Wim Wenders’ Pina (2011) trailer
#2 Pedro Almodovar’s Talk To Her (2002) first scene (featuring Pina Bausch’s Café Müller and herself)
Ever since we saw the opening scene of Pedro Almodovar’s Talk To Her where the two male leads have their first encounter in the audience of Pina Bausch’s Cafe Muller, we have been intrigued by this choreographer. Bausch’s staging and direction is raw and confrontational, with a strong surrealist feeling. Her dancers negotiate sand, earth, and flowers, often getting covered in it themselves - a kind of reminder of the visceral thrill of movement which dance really is. Bausch passed away in June last year, but her company Tanztheater Wuppertal survives her.
Dance is a big topic and motif in cinema right now. After Aronofsky’s Black Swan another film about dance encorporating a totally different concept will hit the cinemas soon. The film Pina by German star director Wim Wenders is a documentary and homage of the work of famous German dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch.
Maybe also the brilliant scenes of Pina Bausch ballets in Pedro Almodovars’ Talk to her inspired Wim Wender to his latest project. Almodovar’s masterpiece stages not only the ballet of Pina Bausch but also the lives of the films characters –its “ensemble”– as a choreography.
Not only this movie shows that dance is a great medium for abstract expressions. It’s extremely visual and often, by music or sounds of the dancers, audible – this makes it predestinated for the medium film. Proof for this are many early films showing dance performances.
Wim Wenders found the motif perfect for the new 3D technique which runs over our movie theaters, or better: Wenders found the 3D aesthetic perfect for making the relation between space and dancer visible which obviously has already concerned Darren Aronofsky in Black Swan.
In my opinion it’s great to embrace the new technique and to try to use all its advantages instead to cling on the past and as consequence be at standstill. For this we have to honour the guts of Wim Wenders and hope he succeeds in drawing the sneered at 3D cinema onto another level.
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