Pina

I saw this film first in a 2D version and loved it - hence the high score. I saw it a week later in 3D because I thought I ought to see what all the fuss was about. I was hugely disappointed. The 3D detracted rather than added to the experience. Perhaps the technology isn't quite good enough yet or this just wasn't the type of film that would benefit from the 3D effects. I found it a distraction from the beauty of the dance. We all know dance happens on a stage in three dimensions and our brains compensate for this when we see a film. We don't need to have the dancers coming at us out of the screen. If you like modern dance you'll see this film and enjoy it. If you don't know whether or not you like it it might convert you, but definitely seek out a 2D version.

Wim Wenders' multiple-award-winning documentary was nominated for an Oscar and a BAFTA. It is a tribute to the late German choreographer, Pina Bausch, as her dancers perform her most famous creations.

I am not familiar with modern dance, so why not watch one of the best at work. I have resolved to broaden my artistic experiences this year, and I could not have picked something more enjoyable with which to start.

Wenders (Buena Vista Social Club, Paris Texas), who I really enjoy as a director, has produced a beautiful tribute. I understand it is also in 3D, but I have to settle for the 2D version. I probably didn't miss anything, but who knows.

The film has very little in the way of dialog; an occasional reflection by her dancers, and focuses on performances of her most famous pieces. They were strange to someone not familiar with modern dance, but they were also innovative and beautiful.

I enjoyed the experience.

Go see it.

I have finally seen a movie which gives me the instinct that this is why this whole film-thing was invented in the first place.

Quick notes: -Music choices fine to excellent, no problem there. -3D absolutely effective and relevant.

I give this a 10 but was brooding to deduct a point for the perhaps slightly out-of-balance weight to...the brooding self-seriousness (humour and fun also abound).

But, no, I'm just being poopy, it really does deserve the full 10.

Before seeing it, I was fortunate to hear an hour-long interview on the CBC Ideas radio program with Wim Wenders. That filled in the blanks of the back story which is not shown in the film itself, so that was very helpful.

Pina, wherever you are, you really did teach me a huge thing or two: Thank You !!

Pina Bausch died just prior to this being made. I was familiar with her just briefly from Almodovar's Talk To Her, but sadly not more and not live. So, at least for the time being, this is as much as we'll get to know her, independent of her being here to explain, assuming she would at all, and this is perhaps the most fitting part. We'll get to know her in the purest sense possible, by what dance stirred her heart. Because in a sense you are what you have embodied and made life from, everything else being words, roles, play-acting, it is more than enough to have just this. It is what dance is all about.

And this is how she handled her troupe, as a director herself. Hints, abstract frameworks. How it comes across in the actual dance is a marvel; the debris of unfinished thoughts in the midst of empty space, of course the entire flow framed small in empty stages, but in each person as well, bits of recognizable motion in the midst of syncopated blurs, half-finished gestures of story.

We see plenty of I assume excerpts of her dances, all of them more or less captivating. I do not know a thing about the medium, so I will let aficionados explain the importance of how she innovated form. She might as well have been an inverse Beckett for all I know, danced, acting out hurt that he repressed.

But I am interested in film, and how images can seduce into the surface the core of our being. And what Pina do the images reveal? Lonely, hurt, strong, frantic search. An anxious sexuality at heart, or better yet anxious at the prospect of touch, connection.

And it is important to note this connection with her players, and by extension ourselves as viewers. All of them without exception are baffled to communicate their relationship with her, as though it was so visceral, so 'now', it is impossible to relate after the fact, disembodied in words. I'm sure they could all say it with a dance, wonderfully so. It is even possible that not all of them got her - one of them dedicates weightlessness in her memory, where the Pina I saw was all about weight and pull.

But the're all definitely sure of one thing, that she looked into their innermost self.

Meddlesome words again, 'that she looked into their innermost self'. Watching the film, this is what I get the sense Pina accomplished: she allowed empty space around these people, not over-directing, not explaining every gesture, perhaps not even communicating a whole point or story, reflecting this in the actually sparse surroundings she prepared around them, so at her smallest hint they poured into that space their own spontaneous being. They came out having bared self, having made sense - body, motion - what used to be words, ideas, having been one with just the moment. Pina had only made it possible they do.

She asked one of her dancers to portray joy, as simple as this. He offered his version, personal self, and she choreographed a scene around it.

So there it is in a nutshell, a valuable insight for us viewers. This is something you watch without the need to know what it means, trusting it does in the exchange.

Oh, there is Wenders in all this. Wenders is a frame artist, always looking for something to frame and apply colors to. Most of the time he has dull insights. In Tokyo-Ga, he set out to frame Ozu but missed by so much it made me cringe. Here he comes across a woman that is unfettered soul. He does not puzzle about how you film dance, trusting she has taken care of even that. He does not get in the way too much, most of the time carving with his camera soft paths inside the dance. His dull insight, in an attempt to somehow address the cinematic experience, is the whole as one more staged performance before an audience - many re-enactions on different stages occur in the film, some of them projected on a screen. But he does not turn any of this into a story, which is bound to alienate most viewers.

It is perhaps lucky that Wenders did this, opposed to say someone like Almodovar who commands deeply layered vision. Like Pina's dancers, he is an empty vessel. She fills with the joy of color.

Pina is being classed as a musical, but it's more of a documentary. More than this, it's a cinematic eulogy to Pina Bausch, one of the world's most influential dancers.

The filmic concept is simple. Footage consisting mainly of contemporary performances of Pina's ballets performed by her dancers is interposed with archive footage of the legendary figure herself. Each dancer, at their turn, looks squarely at the camera and offers their own recollection of how Pina inspired them. This is followed by a demonstration of their learning.

It seems that filming dance is making a comeback in cinema. But after seeing 'Black Swan' and now this, I wonder if dance loses something on the big screen? Maybe the realism or the urgency. Definitely something. It's the same with music concerts. You have to be there.

I'm of the opinion that you have to be an artist to understand other artists. They're a different breed. Where else, for instance, would the remark 'you just have to get crazier' be appropriate if not in dance? Some scenes are bizarre. No they're not. They're mad. Mad like Pina told her students to be. There are some arresting images, which to tease us, Wenders doesn't linger on.

The predictable comment being made of Wenders' film is that it is surreal. I don't believe it is truly surreal. Yes, some of the visuals are unusual – like the Australian dancer who dances with abandon on a street corner with cars driving past and a train travelling upside down. Or the act involving two men spitting water at each other. Or better still the act with a man pulling his trousers up and down. But I swear the effects seem remarkably natural.

I was agape throughout the scene where one dancer in a serene industrial site shows a couple of cuts of meat to us and shouts 'veal!' before dancing on her tiptoes for what seemed like forever. Where was the beauty? I wondered after. I can't explain it. It is just there.

There's nothing snobbish about this film. There's not much that is esoteric either. The music is eclectic and the nationalities of the dancers are diverse. Pina united people. This film isn't exclusively for dance lovers; it's for admirers of culture.

Although I would find a second viewing of Pina to be quite taxing, I have no trouble in recommending it to anyone. It's unlike anything I've seen. It expresses beauty in a way I did not think plausible.

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