From the moment German director Wim Wenders saw the dance Café Müller, he knew he wanted to capture the work of modern-dance choreographer Pina Bausch on film. Yet for decades he could not come to grips with how to depict her particular style. Then it struck him: 3-D. Peering through his Corbusier eyeglasses, Wenders recounts it all with relief and amazement.
Your new documentary Pina, showcasing Bausch’s work and shot in 3-D, took decades to make. Why?
It took a long time, that’s for sure. Pina and I first worked with film [together] in the mid-eighties. Initially it was me who came up with the idea out of sheer enthusiasm, because I had just encountered her work for the first time. And then slowly it was Pina who picked up on it and got more serious.
And then I tried to figure out how to do it and realized it wasn’t enough to be enthusiastic. Dance was hard to grasp in film. It always seemed to me like there was some sort of invisible wall between the Pina on stage, with its contagious energy and physical quality, and what I could put on screen. It just didn’t seem adequate.
I looked at a lot of dance films, and I realized the problem was basically between the tools that cinema has and between the universe of dance. There was a problem.
Because Pina expected so much from this collaboration, she really expected this to be different. And I realized that I couldn’t do anything different with the craft as it existed. I tried hard, and Pina pushed me. But it became sort of a running gag for 20 years.
“When will you know [what you want to make]?” she would ask.
And I would say, “I still don’t know, Pina.”
And eventually she would just raise her eyebrows when she’d see me, and I would shrug my shoulders and laugh.
So when did it finally hit you to shoot in 3-D?
I only found that by chance when I finally saw my first 3-D film in 2007, U2 3D. It showed that there was a different language all of a sudden. That tool was the third dimension, and that was of course essential for dance.
I felt from the beginning there was a huge affinity between this new technology and dance. Each could bring out the best in the other. The body is such an important thing in Pina’s work. And the body is a fiction on the regular screen. In 3-D, the body has volume. The body is an instrument to discover and conquer space. The body has such a different presence in 3-D. Everybody thinks that depth is the great thing about 3-D. But in my book, volume is the great thing.
Did the style of Bausch’s work (its narrative quality, for instance) make it harder to grasp on film?
Her kind of dance is very special. It’s not like ballet, it’s not like theatre. It’s something that didn’t exist before and is quite unique. And that needed this other dimension more than classical ballet. Maybe I would have dared to make a film about something more classical [with ordinary film]. But I always felt that Pina had taken dance and put it back on its feet, and given it to humanity.
There was such a contagious quality in her work. I always felt that these people on stage were not dancers. They were us. When you see classical ballet, you never think you could join them. And with Pina, you always felt it concerned you, was about you, and that you could join them at any given moment.
Talk about your decision to shoot some of the dances outside in the German city of Wuppertal, where Bausch had spent her career.
“Pina worked there for 30 years, in this little industrial town. It allowed her an incredible continuity that I think is quite unique in art. Pina could not have done this body of work in a big city, in Berlin or London or Paris. It needed a quiet little city, in order to work so concentrated, to create this ensemble, this little universe, this sort of utopian humanity. She could not have done that in a big city.
And it’s an amazing little city. The monorail was built the same year as the Eiffel Tower. It’s almost like a decomposed Eiffel Tower stretched out.
What role did the dancers have in the shooting of the film, particularly after Bausch’s sudden death from cancer?
They convinced me [to continue]. When Pina died, none of her dancers or family and friends had been able to say goodbye. I had cancelled the film. It was the dancers who convinced me that we should do it even more so. These pieces that Pina had rehearsed with for the film needed to be preserved.
Will you shoot more films in 3-D?
I will not do anything else. I’m completely hooked. I think it’s useless to go back. Already the expression makes it clear, it will feel like going back. I think 3-D is a still unexplored cinematographic story. In my book, it’s the ideal medium for the documentary of the future. It’s not invented to show us different planets [like in Avatar]. It’s invented to show us our own planet.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Pina opens in select theatres on Friday.
