(Host) Commentator Barry Snyder is a film historian and founder of the Burlington Film
Society. And when
the Academy Awards are handed out this weekend, he’s hoping that top honors for the Best
Documentary Feature will go to a German film that’s innovative in its
use of 3-D technology.
(Snyder) I first saw the film, Pina, in
Montreal in October, and I’ve been agitating to bring it to a local
screen ever since. Happily, it will play at the Majestic Theater in
Williston in the first week of March.
The film is German director
Wim Wender’s loving tribute to the world-renowned dancer, choreographer
and ballet director Pina Baush. It’s a marriage of two great art forms
– dance and film. And as is traditional in a marriage, director
Wenders brings to the occasion both something old and something new.
What’s
old is cinema’s elemental affinity with movement in general and dance
in particular. It’s an affinity already apparent in both the high-brow
term "cinema" and its low-brow equivalent "movies." And it’s hardly
surprising that one of the motion pictures’ very first stars was the
vaudeville dancer Annabelle Moore. Edison filmed her performing her
famous Butterfly Dance in one of the very first films ever made. It
proved so popular among patrons of Edison’s Kinetoscope parlors, that
prints running through the pulleys and gears of the early viewing
machines quickly wore out, and required continuous reprinting.
In
the sound era, the musical continued to carry the torch of dance and
film’s relationship, even as the language of movement was superceded by
more conventional means for telling stories, at least up to the point
where words failed and nothing remained for Fred and Ginger to do but
DANCE!
The something new in the relationship between film and
dance is Pina’s deployment of 3-D technology. Pina is not the first
time 3-D has been applied to dance. That distinction belongs to the 1953
Vincent Price horror classic House of Wax. In that film, 3-D was used
to enhance the spectacle of a chorus line performing the can-can in a
scene set in a turn-of-the-century music hall.
But as used by
vendors in Pina, 3-D technology is more than merely incidental. It
amplifies and intensifies the aesthetic of the extraordinary Pina Bausch
set pieces it stages and documents. It includes, among other things,
Bausch’s ineffably beautiful and tragic Café Muller. And it makes more
present in the imaginative space of the film experience, her
thunderingly intense revisioning of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.
3-D,
like so many new technologies, was promoted to the public as a wave of
the future, without a second of concern about whether it was a future
the public wanted or needed. It’s earliest products, and especially the
higher price it demanded, did very little to allay consumer skepticism.
Seeing Pina, however, should go a long way to convince even the most
doubtful among us that new dimensions have indeed been added to the
movie-going experience. Cinema, with all its aspirations, continues to
evolve. I, for one, can hardly wait to see, and hardly dare to imagine,
what progeny might spring from this, the most happy and most hopeful of
old and new artistic unions.