Pina (2011)

Ignorance truly is bliss. I knew nothing of the documentary film “Pina,” or Pina Bausch, the avant-garde choreographer and subject of this brilliant movie/eulogy, when I entered the theater. What a wonderful education. Bausch was a German-born contemporary dance performer/ instructor/artist/feminist/chain-smoker who died weeks after agreeing to let director Wim Wenders (you know him, right?) make a 3D documentary of her work. She died and then the film died, but her dancers/followers/disciples resurrected the latter to honor the former. An Easter miracle. This is one of the films of 2011, documentary category and overall, shot in glorious big-screen 3D, which I sadly missed out on. 

Wenders starts his film on stages and dance studios within literal film frames, and then takes us out onto the streets, industrial parks, public swimming pools, EL trains, parks, and mountains of Pina’s home country, her dancers, young and old, performing works that touch on love, nature, water, and violence, the movement onscreen and the music so new and thrilling to these naïve eyes and ears, so energetic and beautiful, I was spell bound. He skips the boring this-than-that-happened of most bio-docs and lets Pina’s art speak for her as we watch men and women contort their bodies in unspeakable ways, out of tribute, love and joy. 

The best/most disturbing sequence has a pack of men picking/ jabbing/clutching a woman, it’s harrowing to behold, but amazing: Pina showing how sexist, condescending men openly treat women as a meat product or a car, an object to be bought. No heart. And yet Pina’s heart still beats damn strong. A must watch and listen. A