Surprisingly incoherent and boring

It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

I saw Wim Wenders' «Pina – Dance, Dance, Otherwise We Are Lost» after watching the fine documentary «The Salt of the Earth (A Journey with Sebastião Salgado)» (which he made three years later), and the inversion proved disappointing. When Pina Bausch died unexpectedly, without the dancer and choreographer by his side (as he projected the film since the 1980s), the end result is only fair. I do not know why Wenders thought that 3D could be the "solution" to film dance, when in the past this performing manifestation has been registered in more than adequate ways, without relying much on visual technology: for instance, Norman McLaren made his shorts «Narcissus» and «Pas de deux» with less resources, just as Carlos Saura did «Bodas de sangre», without diminishing the beauty of dance or making its filming less effective. In the end, the majority of living beings who will watch «Pina» will do so in two dimensions. On the other hand, I did not see the need to move the choreographies to exteriors, sometimes in ugly locations (a quarry, for example, or the urban streets with signs of drug stores, lottery or the "big M"), when the best images and moments are those registered in sets of ambitious (and achieved) expressiveness, decorated with few elements, as the sets for «Le sacre du printemps», «Café Müller» and «Vollmond». Beautiful testimonies by Bausch's dancers, come from all corners of the world, and the choreographies rescue this documentary, which goes on for 100 minutes that sometimes seemed endless to me. Yet I would not tell anyone not to see Wender's film: more for dance reasons than for cinematic value, «Pina» is a registry of the work of a great artist, of a daughter of two centuries. It deserves to be recommended, the more so because there are many persons who will enjoy it to the fullest.

For those of you not immersed in the dance world, Pina is a movie about German choreographer Pina Bausch, who recently died at the age of 68. She was a pioneer in her field to say the least, really breaking boundaries with Modern and site-specific dance. I'd obviously heard her name many times in my course of study in college, but really wasn't that familiar with her or her work before going to see the movie. The movie isn't so much a biography of her life as just a presentation of her work by the dancers in her company, interspersed with brief interviews. The dancers each in turn share their impressions of her and what it was like to work with her, while showing some of her most awe-inspiring choreography. I was so moved! Dancer or not, this movie is worth $15 spent to see it in 3-D.What really made an impression on me about Pina's choreography and her dancers was the authenticity of the emotional content. Her work is so emotional by nature, often very sad but sometimes extremely joyous as well. The dancers weren't faking it though. The things they were feeling were real. Obviously I'm not in their heads but something in the way they carried themselves and executed each movement indicated to me that this was a very real and meaningful experience for them. It transcended the mime and pretend of much concert dance I've seen. They were so committed; I couldn't help but feel what they were feeling.Another aspect of her choreography that I found very unique was the site-specific elements she incorporated into her work. She made wonderful use of nature, be it dirt, water, leaves, rocks, trees, or even things found in a city. She used these things the same way Balanchine would use the cavalier in relation to the ballerina. There was a partnership between dancer and environment. The surroundings weren't just a setting, they were part of the dance and without them the meaning would not be the same. I found it so inspiring! In all honesty, I've never been one for site-specific dance. My own experiences with it have been far from satisfying. In Pina's choreography however, I found inspiration! I would like to dabble in site-specific work more now.I don't feel that I have the words to do this movie justice. Just go see it. It was candy for my eyes and food for my soul. I feel so inspired and so thankful to have a person like Pina Bausch pave the way in the art I'm so passionate about.

Reading some the interviews that Wim Wenders gave about Pina I learned that this film ended to be something quite different from what the director originally intended. While fascinated a long time by Pina Bausch's creation and especially Cafe Muller, Wenders could not find for a long time the appropriate means of expression to make a film about it. And then something happened - technology developed and 3D came back with a revenge. The revelation was that 3D and filmed dancing are a perfect fit. The result is a film which is unique in its way, hard to enter in any category, a good example actually of how relative and futile categories are.What we get on screen is a portrait and a homage to Pina Bausch. While Wim Wenders authored many documentaries about music or history of cinema, this film is not the usual documentary, neither is it a biography (no chronology, no theoretical analysis of her work), but a portrait of an artist who was among the few who revolutionized her discipline, a portrait assembled from testimonies from the dancers who worked with her (although some say no words) and most of all by her art as it was filmed and brought to screen. Maybe the best description I found is the one in the German sub-title of the movie - a Tanzfilm, a Dance Movie.There are indeed a great deal of beautifully filmed ballet scenes, in different environments, and here we see the hand of a master director, as almost all required innovation in building the sets and making them look like belonging to a cinema event, not to a filmed performance. As I am a fervent spectator of filmed performances of contemporary dance on Mezzo TV especially, I am pretty familiar with the genre. Wenders succeeds here to work the synthesis, and Pina is both a ballet performance of first class and a cinema event combining the best of the two arts and amplifying it by the power of 3D. The usage of the technology results not only in viewers seeing better and more clearly the performance and the sets (these too), but also making them part of the creative process. In several scenes in the film we see Pina Bausch during repetitions mixing with the dancers, watching and talking with them, working together as a team. With the 3D effect the spectators become part of the work process, part of the show, part of the homage Wenders brings to the great choreographer.

"Your fragility is your greatest strength." - Pina Bausch Wim Wenders directs "Pina", an intermittently interesting documentary which now functions as a eulogy for Pina Bausch, an acclaimed German dance choreographer. Pina died shortly before Wenders began principal photography on his film.Unlike "dance films" and "documentaries" by the likes of Altman and Wiseman, Wenders' film places little emphasis on the behind the scenes struggles of dancers and dance studios and instead dryly records a series of Bausch's more famous dance routines (Café Müller, Le Sacre du Printemps, Vollmond and Kontakthof). Most of these routines are excerpted and heavily cut – were you to watch them in "real life", beginning to end, some of these routines would last up to sixty minutes – so the film doesn't necessarily convey the long-form ebbs and flows of Pina's choreography. Still, there's a haunting, creepy and at times amazing quality to some of the routines Wenders serves up, some of which have been transplanted from stage to a variety of odd, real life locations, like city streets and rolling buses. Most of these dances involve human bodies coming into contact or confrontation with shapes, obstacles and objects, which are surmounted via human malleability; the dancers often seem to move like water or gas, following paths of least resistance. The rest of the choreography seems to trade in simple contrasts, a tug-of-war between aggression and passivity, hard and soft, push and pull, delicacy and rigidity etc. Beyond this Wenders makes no attempt to contextualise Bausch's work, his choice of filming the dances adds little to Pina's choreography (it often detracts!), and often the objects, sets and "metaphors" he adds to her routines are clunky and simplistic, like his use of industrial girders, rolling vehicles and big window panes. It's a kind of obvious decorativeness; art-student grade pretensions. Still, there are numerous powerful moments sprinkled about, though, as is often the case with ballets or dance movies, one's appreciation depends entirely on what one reads into or from the dancer's bodies."Pina" is powerful for most of its first three acts, but begins to drag as it nears its climax. Voice over adulations directed at Pina from her dancers lend the film an overly referential tone, the choreographer sanctified to such an extent that her dances almost cease to speak for themselves. The film was shot in 3D, a technology most typically find annoying, but like fellow German Werner Herzog ("Cave of Forgotten Dreams"), Wenders makes the technology work, his camera weightlessly skirting above and around the dance troupe. There's a sculptural quality to Wenders' 3D images, though I suspect this quality can be found even in the 2d version of the film (which I have not seen) and that both versions can't compete with the power of Pina's live, ground-zero performances.There has been a sudden increase in the number of 3D "dance films" on the market. Wenders' film was released the same year as the Mariinsky Ballet's "Giselle 3D" (based on a Jean Coralli ballet). That film, and the ballet itself, had less frills, was very Russian, stately and elegant. And where Wenders uses 3D to get close, even into, Pina's dances, "Giselle" traded in a cool, austere distance. For me this approach (no frills, less cuts/edits, more removed, more traditional) worked better. But of course Pina is a contemporary, Modern dancer (her work wasn't even primarily about dance). Her work runs counter to classical dance; it's vulgar, experimental, post-industrial, surreal, almost pornographic. It's sexual rather than romantic, about sex, rather than sexy, and almost always conveys a sense of twisted pipes, rubble and oil, frequently deals with brutalisation and humiliation, is often apocalyptic (particularly "The Rite of Springs") and revels in the grotesque, sometimes the same dances even staged with freakishly elderly dancers. In other words, very Post War German.7.9/10 – Worth one viewing. See Wiseman's "Ballet", "The Dance" and Altman's "Company".