Pina · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A woman crosses a café with her eyes shut. She doesn't slow down. Another dancer runs ahead of her hurling chairs and tables out of the way, can't quite keep up, and she collides, recovers, keeps going. That is Café Müller, which Pina Bausch made in 1978, and it is where Wim Wenders begins: framed square from the stalls, proscenium visible, the best seat in the house. Then the camera stands up and walks onto the stage.

Wenders had wanted to film Bausch for two decades and could never imagine the form. Preproduction finally began in 2009, with her helping design it. She was diagnosed with cancer and died on 30 June, days before the first day of shooting. He stopped the film. The company asked him to make it anyway.

What he made has no chronology, no narrator, no dates on screen. Four works Bausch chose herself, Le Sacre du printemps, Café Müller, Kontakthof and Vollmond, are broken into fragments and dealt out across the running time, with solos staged in Wuppertal's quarries and traffic islands in between, and portraits of her dancers sitting silent in front of the lens. Some critics called this an evasion, a memorial that declines to explain its subject. The complaint is fair and I think it's wrong, but you need a vocabulary to say why. Gilles Deleuze's is the best one going. He never saw the film; he died in 1995.

His basic distinction is between two kinds of cinema. In one, someone perceives a situation and acts, and the action changes the situation; that circuit runs everything from the Western to the thriller. In the other it breaks. A character sees something they can do nothing about, so they look and listen instead. Deleuze called those moments pure optical and sound situations, and found them first in postwar Italy, where there was more to witness than to fix. Pina is made almost entirely of them. The dancers can perform, and performing changes nothing. So the film does the only other thing available, which is to attend. Read it as attending rather than explaining and the missing biography stops looking like a hole.

What it attends to is bodies, and here Deleuze fits Bausch almost embarrassingly well. Late in Cinema 2 he argues that modern film puts time into the body rather than the plot: the attitude a body holds, the tiredness in it, the waiting. Bausch built her pieces by asking her dancers questions and making material out of their answers, so the choreography carries the particular people who made it. Her work is stored in muscle. Wenders films accordingly. Long takes, because coverage destroys dance and because her repetition needs duration to wear a gesture down until it means something else. Hélène Louvart lights for volume rather than legibility. The mix keeps the breath, the feet landing in peat and water, the friction of cloth, the small involuntary sounds of effort that only the front rows ever hear.

Deleuze borrows a word from Brecht for a posture that exposes the social arrangement it belongs to: the gest. Kontakthof is nothing but gests, a line of people presenting themselves for approval, courtship staged as inspection. Bausch restaged that piece with nonprofessional seniors, and again with teenagers, and Wenders puts those versions in one film. The same shy shoulder, the same offered hand, at seventeen and at seventy. Not a flashback, and not a before-and-after. Deleuze's term is peaks of present: contradictory presents held together, none of them the original. The ritual turns out to be older than any body performing it, which is an argument about desire no voiceover could have made.

Wenders's own invention is small and exact. He sits each dancer in front of the camera and they say nothing; the voice runs on the soundtrack, unhooked from the lips, remembering her. Image and sound stop confirming each other, which is what Deleuze means by audiovisual disjunction: two tracks, two separate witnesses. And the voice isn't dialogue. It's testimony, a speech act in his sense, the voice that legends the dead rather than converses with the living. Grief sits in the gap between the still face and the moving voice, and nobody has to act it. The one image the film cannot have is Bausch herself, and when she appears it is in old 2D footage of her dancing Café Müller. Inside a stereoscopic film that footage reads flat, grainy, unreachable. An accident of formats becomes the truest thing in the movie.

The anthology structure has a name too. Deleuze separates the dated flashback from sheets of past, the past as coexisting layers you move around inside rather than a line you walk back down. Sacre and Café Müller keep returning, never completed, each time from a different depth. Toni Froschhammer's cuts join an opera house to a gravel pit with nothing continuous between them, which is Deleuze's interstice: the cut as an AND rather than a THEN.

That grammar has a founder. Maya Deren's A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945) carried one movement phrase across a forest, an apartment and a museum, so the edit finished the gesture the dancer began. Wenders takes that permission and walks a Bausch phrase out of the theatre onto a traffic island. The two-stage opening is The Red Shoes: start from the stalls with the pit in frame, then dissolve the theatre by putting the camera onstage among the dancers. Almodóvar had already framed Café Müller head-on from the house to open Talk to Her, and Norman McLaren's Pas de deux had raked side-light across dancers on black to sculpt them into volume, which is what stereo now does with two lenses. Chantal Akerman's Un jour Pina a demandé… built the excerpt-plus-testimony architecture on tour with the company; Wenders keeps it and removes Bausch's live voice from it. In Tokyo-Ga he had already built an artist portrait around the artist's absence, laying commentary over Ozu's traces. He knew the method before he needed it.

Deleuze wrote about dance mostly through the Hollywood musical, where he noticed something that happens here too: at some point the dancer stops being the one who moves and becomes the one whom a world moves. Watch a solo with the Schwebebahn sliding overhead, or one danced against quarry strata. The phrase and the city are a single motion. Bausch said she cared not about how people move but about what moves them, and this is the shot that says it.

Which is where the technology stops being a gimmick. Bazin defended depth of field because it kept dramatic space whole and left viewers free to look where they chose instead of having the meaning cut out for them in advance. Alain Derobe's stereography follows the same ethic: interaxial and convergence near human binocular geometry, negative parallax used sparingly, almost nothing thrown at the audience. Depth as a room you are standing in. Dance is the case that proves the point, because a flat image doesn't merely diminish choreography, it deletes the dimension the choreography is written in. Two years after Avatar, Pina turned 3D into an instrument of preservation and became the first 3D film nominated for the documentary Oscar. It also showed that a life could be documented as an anthology of gestures instead of a chronology of events. Alla Kovgan's Cunningham (2019) took the strategy over whole; Wenders extended it himself in Cathedrals of Culture and, most directly, in Anselm (2023).

Go back to the chairs. A dancer runs ahead of a woman who won't open her eyes, clearing furniture she collides with anyway. That is also the film's method: keep the ground clear, don't explain the walking. Watch it again for the feet, where they land, in peat, in water, on gravel, and listen for the breathing, which is the sound of a body keeping someone else's time.