Pina - a new masterpiece of cinema

Many critics have derided digital 3D as a gimmick, often with good reason. Hollywood studios have recently been using it in a way that is cheesy and exploitative, taking films designed and filmed in conventional 2D and then converting them using an unsatisfactory technical process that produces a visually degraded image. In films such as Alice and The Green Hornet the result is not so much three dimensional imagery as a series of flat surfaces that look like cardboard cut-outs placed atop one another.

Wenders has made Pina specifically for the 3D medium, and that means not only shooting with 3D cameras but rethinking how the cameras might be used to create a new cinematic language. If the IMAX concert film U2: 3D hinted at new possibilities for the medium, Wenders – who cites that film as an inspiration - expands them, offering his audience a new way of relating to the space(s) on the screen. In Pina, the physicality of the dance medium finds a perfect cinematic correlative.



A word of warning for anyone expecting a conventional, biographical documentary about a choreographer. This is not really “about” Bausch at all but rather an elaborate performance piece divided by brief interludes in which individual members of Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch offer brief but telling insights into Bausch.

Wenders planned the film in collaboration with Bausch before her sudden death in 2009 and calls it a film ”for“ her. In essence it is a celebration in which extracts from four of her works are staged in a visually startling array of settings.

Throughout Wenders captures not only the dancers’ extraordinary movements and expressions, he places them in extraordinary and unexpected spatial contexts - from stages and rehearsal studios to traffic intersections and trains, from swimming pools and factories to glass-walled buildings amid forests.

If I have a criticism, it is a minor one: the lengthy opening sequence taken from Bausch’s presentation of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) chops up this epochal work in such a way as to do it a disservice. There again, here is a sequel in waiting: the Bausch Sacre du Printemps in full. Bring it on.