Wim Wenders' 'Pina' captures choreographer's skill
Director Wim Wenders describes Pina Bausch, the late choreographer he gloriously celebrates in his 3-D documentary “Pina,” as the older sister he never had. Both natives of Germany’s Rhineland region, the pair spoke with the same accent. More than that, even before they first met in 1985 in Venice, far away from their home country, their destinies intertwined.
In 1973, in the same month that Bausch was appointed the artistic director of the Wuppertal Opera Ballet, soon rechristened Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, Wenders was in Wuppertal filming scenes for the 1974 drama he considers his breakthrough, “Alice in the Cities.”
“Of course, we didn’t know each other then, but it was at the very same time when for me ‘Alice in the Cities,’ that was my beginning. So we began at the same moment in time,” the 66-year-old Dusseldorf native says in conversation at the Toronto International Film Festival, where “Pina” screened as part of the Masters section.
A dozen years later when he first saw Tanztheater Wuppertal perform, the filmmaker was one of the stars of the New German Cinema, the man who made “Kings of the Road,” “The American Friend” and “The State of Things.” He’d spent time in San Francisco, where he made “Hammett” for Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios. In 1984, he scored a hat trick at the Cannes Film Festival when he took home the Palme d’Or, the Fipresci Prize, and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury for “Paris, Texas.” But as he sat transfixed by “Café Müller,” a 35-minute work in which three men and three women move as if sleepwalking about the stage, stumbling together, falling apart, sometimes crashing into walls, Wenders found himself humbled by Bausch’s art.
“She showed me more about men and women than I really had discovered through the entire history of cinema, and all of that without a single word,” he remembers. “I was on the edge of my seat after a few minutes, because I couldn’t believe it. I thought I was imagining it, but I wasn’t imagining it, it actually happened. I saw a distillation of what I thought cinema was able to do and could do, and it was more powerful, it was more emotional, it was simpler. And it used a language that we don’t use in cinema, at least not like that.
“The language of our bodies is, of course, part of what we do as directors in cinema, but we’re bloody amateurs or illiterates compared to the mastery of Pina’s use of body language,” he continues. “I felt it was so perfect and it was so deep. I didn’t understand it only with my brain and my heart, but my body understood it. That was the revelation for me. My body knew what she was saying. My body understood what these dancers were doing and that was completely a new experience, that my body had a knowledge of and was finally allowed into a territory that it’s never been in. I was almost beside myself by then, because I was so happy that I had found a whole new dimension of perception.”
Wenders arranged to meet Bausch for coffee the next day. He remembers talking nonstop for 10 minutes while Bausch smiled at him and smoked a couple of cigarettes. He already knew that he wanted to make a film and insisted they were bound to make it together. Bausch said little, which he took as a rejection. A year went by, and then he saw her again when he went to another Tanztheater Wuppertal performance.
“She came to me and said she recognized me and said, as if it had been yesterday, ‘You mentioned a movie? That is a good idea. We should talk about this,’ ” he recalls.
Full beauty of art
Wenders and Bausch remained friends until her death in 2009, always intending to make that film, but the limits inherent in film flummoxed him. He did not want to make the movie unless he could fully show the beauty of Bausch’s art and he didn’t see how he could do that.
