The Specter of Pina Bausch: Enhancing the Possibilities of Tanztheater through Film in Wim Wenders’s Pina (2011)

After watching Pina Bausch’s Café Müller in 1985 for the first time, the awestruck Wim Wenders decided to make a film with the choreographer featuring her dances. After Bausch’s untimely death in 2009, however, Wenders dedicated the film Pina to her. I argue that their comparable aesthetics—focusing on the image instead of a narrative—allow him to experiment with the filming of dance. Wenders still consciously references Bausch’s Tanztheater form but also enhances the viewer’s experience by using various filmic techniques not easily possible on stage: first, Wenders invokes a dancefilm lens using such techniques as gesture dance and what I am calling voiceover vignettes. Second, he edits earlier footage of Bausch and company into his own filming using match cuts to allow the specter of Bausch to dance again with her ensemble. These aesthetic methods, therefore, widen the scope with which he and other filmmakers can conceptualize of the dancing body in filmic space.