The startling beauty of dance in 3D

Wim Wenders' latest film, Pina, has made the 65-year-old director a 3D evangelist and, oddly perhaps, it was U2 who showed him the way. LOUISE EASTreports

FOR OVER two decades, the director Wim Wenders and the choreographer Pina Bausch used a shorthand. Every time they met, she would ask simply, “So, do you know yet?” and he would reply “Not yet Pina, not yet”.

To Wenders, the problem seemed intractable. Ever since a girlfriend had dragged him to a performance of Bausch's Café Müllerin 1985 (he burst into tears ten minutes in), he'd wanted to make a film about Bausch's ground-breaking work, yet he just couldn't work out how to translate the texture and bite of dance, its unique depth of field, onto the screen.

"I was at a loss," Wenders says simply. "I didn't know how." The deus ex machinawhich finally solved the riddle could hardly have been more unlikely: "In May 2007, U2 decided to play on the steps of the festival palais in Cannes and to show a concert film called U2 3D. That was the first time I put on these glasses, and the moment it started, I shouted, "Eureka!"

At 65, Wim Wenders looks exactly how a European arthouse director should; clever, slightly lugubrious face, eccentric hair, difficult glasses. He wears a jumper of Yves Klein blue, his watch strapped to his wrist outside the cloth. He speaks in a voice so soft he feels compelled to check on my Dictaphone himself. The night before we meet, an exhibition of his photography opened at London’s Haunch of Venison gallery, and giant images of Berlin, Montana and Palermo hang on the walls around us.

Although there's been a distinct falling-off in form since the 1970s and 1980s when films such as Alice in the Cities, Kings of the Road, Wings of Desireand Paris, Texasconfirmed Wenders as one of the unholy trinity (alongside Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Herzog) of the New Germany Cinema, Wenders's career has been nothing if not varied.

Aside from the 30-plus features and short films, he's made music videos for U2 and Talking Heads, published several books of essays and photography, and with the documentary Buena Vista Social Club, provided the soundtrack for pretty much every dinner party between 1999 and 2003. Few things though, have excited him as much as the moment he realised the potential of U2's still-primitive 3D live-action movie.

“I realised that 3D was the answer, that this was what Pina and I had been missing. It opened a big door in the screen and behind that big door lay the territory where Pina and I wanted to go.” He pauses and then surges on.

“Except we never got to do it.” In June 2009, just two days before Baush and Wenders were due to start work on the film, Pina Bausch died, having received a cancer diagnosis just five days previously.

“Her death was completely unexpected and unimaginable, for the troupe as well as for me. I cancelled the film, pulled the plug. The film we had wanted to make and had dreamt of for so long was clearly impossible.”

In the end, it was the dancers who persuaded Wenders to return to the project, on the grounds that the four pieces already chosen by Pina for the film – Café Müller, Kontakthof, Le Sacre du Printemps, Vollmond– still fleetingly carried the marks of her direction. Those pieces provide the backbone of Pina, a film of such startling beauty and meditative grace, it catapults 3D out of the multiplex and into the arthouse.

Columns of dancers clad in evening dress float out through the cinema screen, passing so close you can almost feel the whisper of silk on your knuckles. A cardinal-red dress shimmers in mid-air, a ghostly glow of menace and sexual threat; when it is grabbed by a mob, you flinch.

Mostly though, it is the feeling of weightlessness which impresses; Wenders uproots the audience from the stalls and shoots them from a worms-eye to a birds’ eye view with the twitch of a limb.

“I was convinced that 3D would bring out the best in dance and vice versa, that dancers would also bring out the best in this new language. Really though, it was still wishful thinking when we started,” Wenders says.

"A month after we started shooting, Avatarcame out and that was a happy day in my life because it put 3D on the map. Until then, everybody had thought we were crazy. It was difficult to convince anybody to finance the movie because their only question was, does it also exist in a non-3D version? Nobody believed this was anything other than some pipe-dream of mine."

Like a bad joke about waiting years for one 3D documentary by a German auteur to come along and then two arriving at once, this month also sees the release of Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams, a film about the Chauvet Cave in France. Far from being put out by the coincidence, Wenders is evangelical in his desire to see more directors working in 3D.

“So far, it’s been an instrument in the hands of the big studios, who owned the technology but never owned the language. They didn’t even care about it.

Since Avatar, in which Cameron really created a masterpiece, the door's been wide open but nobody walked through it, which drove me crazy. At least now, a few documentary film makers are beginning to use the technology; Herzog courageously entered the territory. But I'm still waiting for somebody to find a way to enter that door and tell a story that really occupies that new land." Wenders is now back living in Berlin after years of living and working in the United States, a move he happily acknowledges is metaphorical as well as literal.

"I was just too preoccupied for a while with America. As a kid everything I liked came from there, the books, the comics, the music, the candies, the movies. My favourite book was Huckleberry Finn. America became for me the über-country and maybe because it was such a big image in my mind, it took me a long time to shake it.

“Now though, I feel I’ve exorcised that whole American dream of mine. I lived in America for so long only to realise I couldn’t make an American movie. I didn’t have it in me. The films I did make were always the view of an outsider. It took all this time in America to accept that I was German, a romantic German and that my craft was that of the European film-maker.”

Pina, which is by any stretch of the imagination, a return to form for Wenders is cyclical in another way too. The film's most stunning footage shows dancers interacting with the motorways, forests and intriguing suspended monorail of Wuppertal, the home of Bausch's dance company and also the location of key scenes in Alice in the Cities, Wenders' fourth film.

"These two are strangely linked because I shot Alice in the Citiesin [Wuppertal] and that film was really the start of my film-making career. The three I'd done before, I'd been testing other people's languages: Cassavetes, Hitchcock, David Lean," he laughs. "I realised I'd made three movies and I didn't have a language of my own. I thought, well if I can't make a movie that isn't imitation then why continue. That movie for me, was Alice in the Cities."

With Pinalooking set to usher in a new era of 3D film-making and rejuvenating Wenders as a director once more, does he see himself using the technology again?

“I can not possibly go back, and already that expression indicates what a regression it would represent to me. I’m absolutely certain it’s the ideal platform for the documentary and that it’ll lift that genre to a whole new level. I’m totally hooked.”

Pina

opens at the IFI (irishfilm.ie) on April 22nd. Preview April 21st