Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Pina
2011 · Wim Wenders · Pina on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the camera start from a theater seat, then walk onstage. (camera)
Wenders first frames a dance piece as though you were sitting in the stalls, proscenium and all, then the camera stands up and moves in among the dancers themselves.
Payoff: The shift breaks the usual distance between a stage and its audience, right in front of you.
Notice dancers performing in a quarry and on a traffic island. (staging)
Bausch's stage pieces are relocated outdoors into Wuppertal itself, using gravel pits, hillsides, and the city's suspended monorail as the setting instead of a theater.
Payoff: The choreography belongs to this specific, unglamorous city, not just to a stage.
Watch a dancer sit silent while their voice speaks separately. (staging)
Each dancer portrait shows a still, silent face on screen while a remembrance plays on the soundtrack, the two deliberately never lining up.
Payoff: Grief becomes visible in the very gap between the quiet face and the moving voice. In the reading: audiovisual disjunction. The reading calls this audiovisual disjunction: two separate tracks, the still face and the moving voice, each its own witness.
Listen for breath and feet landing under the music. (sound)
The stage recordings capture the close, physical sounds of dance, breath, feet striking peat or water, fabric friction, the kind of detail only a front row would hear.
Payoff: The sound puts you closer to the dancers' bodies than any seat in the actual theater could.
Notice there's no narrator, no dates, and no chronology. (cutting)
The film has no biography of Bausch at all, just stage excerpts, city solos, and portraits arranged associatively, with the same works returning as fragments rather than complete pieces.
Payoff: The structure works like a book of remembrances rather than an account of a life and career. In the reading: sheets of past. The reading calls this sheets of past: the works kept returning as coexisting layers rather than a line walked back down.
Once you have seen it
Watch the same ritual performed by both teenagers and seniors. (performance)
Kontakthof appears in versions Bausch restaged with nonprofessional seniors and again with teenagers, so the same courtship-and-display ritual plays out in bodies decades apart.
Payoff: The ritual reveals itself as older than any single body performing it, at either end of a life. In the reading: the gest. The reading calls this the gest: a posture that exposes a whole social relation, here courtship staged as inspection.
Notice how flat and grainy Bausch's own archival footage looks. (setting)
The one time Bausch herself appears, dancing in old two-dimensional footage of Cafe Muller, it reads as noticeably flatter and grainier inside this three-dimensional film.
Payoff: An accident of format becomes the truest image in the film of what has actually been lost.
Watch how abruptly the film cuts from a theater to a quarry. (cutting)
Toni Froschhammer joins an opera house directly to a gravel pit with nothing continuous linking them, holding two spaces together with nothing but the cut itself.
Payoff: The cut works as a simple and, not a then, joining two places rather than explaining a journey between them.
Carry this in: Watch the feet and listen for breath. The dance is stored in the dancers' bodies, not a script.