Pina - 3D in art house cinema

The technology of stereoscopy, with its effect of depth-of-field in photography or motion pictures, has represented the major marketing tool in recent cinema. This “novelty,” which has existed for several decades, is the main reason for the increased success of many animation films, such as Avatar and Up – both for the number of spectators and for the fact that 3D films are more expensive than regular 2D ones. With fewer spectators than Titanic, Avatar has raised a larger income than its predecessor, thanks to inflated ticket prices and 3D. Therefore this technique has become respectable as an economic tool. Cinematic genres normally associated with impact and public immersion, such as adventure, horror and war, quickly started experimenting with 3D.

However, a new kind of respectability reaches this technique once it transforms art house and auteur films. That’s the case of Wim Wenders and his homage to German dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch. When the filmmaker announced his intention to make use of this method, many critics and producers welcomed the news with suspicion. It seemed somehow heretical to represent the prestigious Bausch with the same technique mostly used to give shape to Shrek’s flatulence or the human slaughter in the Saw series.

Maybe that’s why Pina is a surprise on so many levels. It is curious to see this tool, usually associated with magic and fantasy, representing the realistic movements of human bodies. The “immersion” produced by the third dimension does not imply an absence of rational spectatorship, but a sort of estrangement built by the conflict between the immersion of images and the distance of nature, that of the dancers and the distant voice-over of the interviewees. The traditional image of a passive public, merely entertained during a spectacle, is confronted with this documentary with no documents, no dates, no names of dancers, almost no information or context. Wenders believes the dancers are better represented by dance itself, thus ignoring Bausch’s evolution as an artist, her personal life, or her relationship with the world surrounding her creations.

In the silent and demonstrational image of dance, the greatest innovation proposed by the filmmaker consists in disposing the dancers as much on scene as on wide open spaces, both empty natural fields and isolated industrial sites – all of them perfectly modern and symmetrical. The subways and the iron architecture are accompanied by nothing but a contemporary electronic soundtrack and body movements. The film removes from the dance its noble and elitist character in order to expose it in a much more popular and exciting way, dynamic as a rollercoaster, with its rhythms, shapes, volumes and colors.

Whereas a few dancers portray Bausch as a metaphysical goddess (she can see our souls, she has a strength that no one else has, some of them say), the younger artists admit their difficulty in working with this person who didn’t speak much, who explained even less, but who demanded a lot. The experienced ones prefer auteur worship, while the new ones see Bausch as a mysterious artist, as talented as many others from her generation. It’s on this side of modernity that this auteur film finds its discourse, on the same side of feelings and sensations as any big studio production normally rejected by film critics and so-called “erudite cinephilia”.

To sum up, Pina is based on the constant confrontation between proximity (the 3D, the feelings, the adoration of Bausch) and distance (because everything that is put on a pedestal is, by definition, far from the common man), in a sort of homage not exactly to an exceptional dancer, but to dance as a whole, and to everyday movements, the choreography of day-to-day life, the one found in the parks, the subways, the streets. Dance, dance, otherwise we’ll go mad. This is one of Bausch’s quotations and the slogan of the film – an idea that Wenders respects and understands very well.

By Bruno Carmelo