American Cinematographer - September 2011 - 45

Spring (with Stravinsky’s music), Café Müller, Meeting Hall and Full Moon. These longer public performances are linked by different strands: short dance solos and duets in striking locations in Wuppertal, brief filmed portraits of dancers reminiscing, and documentary glimpses of Bausch. The recurring thread of the dance works is clearly the passionate, tender, painful relationship between men and women. Though Wenders’ film carefully avoids any explanation of Bausch’s work — there are no voices other than those of Bausch and her dancers — her dancers’ words evoke a driven and questioning dance innovator who encouraged her troupe to contribute their own experiences to her choreography. As one observes, “All of her pieces were about love and pain … and beauty and sorrow and loneliness. I was trying to understand her, figure out why she had to keep working and working and working.” Another dancer recalls that Bausch would simply tell her: “Keep searching.” The dancers more closely resemble a theatrical cast than a homogeneous dance troupe, with dancers often enacting characters as they perform. The troupe can dance as one, but it is also striking in its diversity: in size, body shape, country of origin and age. “It was good being an older dancer with Pina!” recalls one dancer. “At 40, more and more I thought, ‘All these opportunities to be old and a child at the same time.’” Meeting Hall, one of the stage pieces, goes further, featuring guest appearances of a chorus line made of men and women over 65, and another of teenagers. Garnier says the production’s equipment choices were driven by two goals: to be close to the dancers and to represent the 3-D space faithfully. The filmmakers chose a 30' Technocrane with a Scorpio remote head to glide the two-camera 3-D system above the stage, because, says Garnier, “we needed to be close to the dancers and to be mobile with a big camera that weighed 60 kilos [132 pounds].” The aim, adds Derobe, was to have “the camera dance among

Unit photography by Donata Wenders, courtesy of Neue Road Movies GmbH.

Opposite: Dancers frolic in a river onstage as they perform Pina Bausch’s Full Moon, the finale of the 3-D feature Pina. This page, above: The ensemble performs Meeting Hall. Left: A Technocrane mounted to a platform placed above the theater’s front rows was used to shoot all of the onstage performances.

the dancers.” For logistical reasons, Pina’s 4½week shoot was spread over three periods. Three weeks were spent shooting performances in a theater. Each of the four dance pieces was shot five times during a nonstop public performance, with the Technocrane jutting out from the audience, its base on a platform above the front rows of the theater. Additional “special shot” pickups were filmed without an audience, often with the Technocrane on the stage. Another week of production was
ww.theasc.com w

devoted to shooting dancers doing short solos and duets in a variety of picturesque and quirky locations. Exteriors were shot in and around Wuppertal’s monorail cars, in the middle of a traffic island, on hills overlooking nearby landscapes, in a river and in a wood (with a dancer wielding a leafblower). There were also interior locations in a mining tunnel, with a dancer shouldering a spotlight, and some elegant architectural spaces, including a cultural center. Widmer shot the nonstage footage mostly with a Steadicam
September 2011 45

http://www.theasc.com

American Cinematographer - September 2011

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - September 2011