Who could have predicted that it would take the surviving leading lights of the New German Cinema to put 3D to good use? Werner Herzog used the technique to examine ancient cave paintings, and now Wim Wenders, in his dynamic elegy for German dance-theater pioneer Pina Bausch, puts us between the virgin and her sacrificer in a grueling Rite of Spring.
>> INTERVIEW: Wim Wenders on Pina by Peter Keough <<
A model of the chair-strewn set of Café Müller is brought to life with tiny dancers; and three performances of Kontakthof, with differently aged casts, are folded into one. Between these tableaux of bad romance, a man in a tutu does grand pliés on a railroad trolley, a dancer crams veal into her toe shoes, and others perform antics both ridiculous and sublime in and under a suspended monorail. A chorus line of swells returns, strutting through a concrete plaza to "St. Louis Blues," capping a milestone in dance and 3D filmmaking.
>> DANCE REVIEW: Wim Wenders films Pina Bausch by Marcia B. Siegel <<
