[LA Times]
Twenty-five years ago, Wim Wenders‘ girlfriend dragged him to a performance by Tanztheater Wuppertal, the modern dance company led by Pina Bausch. “I tried to avoid it,” the German filmmaker recalled. “Dance was not for me…. Finally I went along, expecting a boring evening.”
It turned out to be a life-changing experience. “I have seen other dance since then, but I’ve never been touched by anything as much as Pina’s work,” Wenders said in a recent interview in West Hollywood. He eventually struck up a friendship with the choreographer, and together they planned to make a documentary about the company.
More than 20 years in the making, “Pina,” which opens Jan. 14 in L.A., captures Bausch’s intense, confrontational style of dance through a selection of her works filmed onstage and outdoors. The movie uses 3-D technology to create a sense of spatial depth and viewer immersion that is absent in traditional dance documentaries.
The film samples some of the late choreographer’s most celebrated ensemble pieces, including “The Rite of Spring,” “Cafe Muller,” “Kontakthof” and the water-themed “Vollmond,” as well as a number of her more intimate works. They were shot in and around Wuppertal, the rather drab, industrial city in western Germany where Bausch worked for most of her career. …
The movies are part of a nascent wave of 3-D documentaries to hit the market, encompassing subjects as diverse as pop music (“Justin Bieber: Never Say Never”) to the historical epic (“Fields of Valor: The Civil War,” a documentary miniseries airing this month on 3net, a 3-D channel backed by Imax, Sonyand Discovery.) …
In 2007, Wenders saw the concert movie “U2 3D” at the Cannes Film Festival. “From the first shot I knew this was the answer to our 20 years of hesitation. This was the language that was made for it,” he said.
But tests revealed that 3-D had problems when it came to capturing dance. Wenders worked with Alain Derobe, a pioneer in the field of stereoscopy, which is the technique behind 3-D moviemaking. Early screen tests showed “depth and space beautifully, but movement was a disaster,” recalled Wenders. “Any fast movement in our first tests was jerky and not pleasant at all. My assistant moved his arms in front of the camera, and it looked like an Indian goddess.”
Eventually, the crew learned the right combination of shutter speed and lenses, but they still had to avoid certain things, like lateral pans that resulted in blurred images. …
Read the full review here: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-ca-pina-20111211,0,902532.story