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Horst in Translation ([email protected]) "Pina" is a German, 100-minute movie from 4 years ago. It was nominated at the BAFTAs (Foreign Language Film) and Oscars (Documentary) and was famous filmmaker Wim Wenders' tribute to the late dancer and dance choreographer Pina Bausch. Wenders held the eulogy at her funeral, so I assume the two were friends and pretty close. The film basically consists of interviews with Bausch, her dancers and also many dance scenes. It is probably Wenders' most known work in recent years, especially with the awards recognition it received.Unfortunately, as much as I like the director, I cannot say I was too impressed here. It is not a film that got me interested in the multi-layered world of dancing. You already need to have a profound interest before watching in order to appreciate this film or, in a best-case-scenario, either be a dancer himself or have a personal connection to Bausch. I must say I did not even know her. She was certainly not particularly famous to the general public, even here in Germany. There weren't many sequences in this documentary that I found captivating or memorable, not to say any at all. If you have no real connection with dance or aren't a huge Wenders fan, you can skip this movie and you will not be missing much. Not recommended.

rebs_neto I've seen some plays of Pina's work and also heard about her in my drama classes, thus I decided to watch this movie to better understand her life, her achievements, in short, to know her better. From the beginning to the end I was shocked, nothing say about her personal life, she barely appear in the movie, however I could completely understand her, I emulate her dance, I dance with the art, I dance with the feelings, I spent all the time there, following her passion. During the scenes her dance partners spoke about her and I could see her strength and, mostly, her beliefs. She truly believed in her acts, she believed with so much passion and with freedom that we certainly finish the movie flying,our minds creativity boiling and our body exhausted, freely. If you are reading this review is because you considered to watch this movie...just one advice: Go with passion!

tieman64 "Your fragility is your greatest strength." - Pina Bausch Wim Wenders directs "Pina", an intermittently interesting documentary which now functions as a eulogy for Pina Bausch, an acclaimed German dance choreographer. Pina died shortly before Wenders began principal photography on his film.Unlike "dance films" and "documentaries" by the likes of Altman and Wiseman, Wenders' film places little emphasis on the behind the scenes struggles of dancers and dance studios and instead dryly records a series of Bausch's more famous dance routines (Café Müller, Le Sacre du Printemps, Vollmond and Kontakthof). Most of these routines are excerpted and heavily cut – were you to watch them in "real life", beginning to end, some of these routines would last up to sixty minutes – so the film doesn't necessarily convey the long-form ebbs and flows of Pina's choreography. Still, there's a haunting, creepy and at times amazing quality to some of the routines Wenders serves up, some of which have been transplanted from stage to a variety of odd, real life locations, like city streets and rolling buses. Most of these dances involve human bodies coming into contact or confrontation with shapes, obstacles and objects, which are surmounted via human malleability; the dancers often seem to move like water or gas, following paths of least resistance. The rest of the choreography seems to trade in simple contrasts, a tug-of-war between aggression and passivity, hard and soft, push and pull, delicacy and rigidity etc. Beyond this Wenders makes no attempt to contextualise Bausch's work, his choice of filming the dances adds little to Pina's choreography (it often detracts!), and often the objects, sets and "metaphors" he adds to her routines are clunky and simplistic, like his use of industrial girders, rolling vehicles and big window panes. It's a kind of obvious decorativeness; art-student grade pretensions. Still, there are numerous powerful moments sprinkled about, though, as is often the case with ballets or dance movies, one's appreciation depends entirely on what one reads into or from the dancer's bodies."Pina" is powerful for most of its first three acts, but begins to drag as it nears its climax. Voice over adulations directed at Pina from her dancers lend the film an overly referential tone, the choreographer sanctified to such an extent that her dances almost cease to speak for themselves. The film was shot in 3D, a technology most typically find annoying, but like fellow German Werner Herzog ("Cave of Forgotten Dreams"), Wenders makes the technology work, his camera weightlessly skirting above and around the dance troupe. There's a sculptural quality to Wenders' 3D images, though I suspect this quality can be found even in the 2d version of the film (which I have not seen) and that both versions can't compete with the power of Pina's live, ground-zero performances.There has been a sudden increase in the number of 3D "dance films" on the market. Wenders' film was released the same year as the Mariinsky Ballet's "Giselle 3D" (based on a Jean Coralli ballet). That film, and the ballet itself, had less frills, was very Russian, stately and elegant. And where Wenders uses 3D to get close, even into, Pina's dances, "Giselle" traded in a cool, austere distance. For me this approach (no frills, less cuts/edits, more removed, more traditional) worked better. But of course Pina is a contemporary, Modern dancer (her work wasn't even primarily about dance). Her work runs counter to classical dance; it's vulgar, experimental, post-industrial, surreal, almost pornographic. It's sexual rather than romantic, about sex, rather than sexy, and almost always conveys a sense of twisted pipes, rubble and oil, frequently deals with brutalisation and humiliation, is often apocalyptic (particularly "The Rite of Springs") and revels in the grotesque, sometimes the same dances even staged with freakishly elderly dancers. In other words, very Post War German.7.9/10 – Worth one viewing. See Wiseman's "Ballet", "The Dance" and Altman's "Company".

chaos-rampant 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.