Pina

Perhaps we need to think further about the complete possibilities of 3D? In Pina, Wim Wenders’ physically articulate and emotionally giving posthumous documentary about the acclaimed German choreographer Pina Bausch, the gimmick of blockbusters is used to serve a more subtle vision. In the various works from Bausch’s career that are captured for the screen 3D isn’t used a blunt object (this film is no Step Up 3D), instead it serves as an aid to visual understanding; the lithe, committed dancers from Bausch’s company have an enhanced physicality and the parameters of the choreography are more obvious. Dance’s variables – spatial, sensual – are enhanced.

This picture, which has been brusquely declared the first 3D arthouse release, was originally intended as a collaboration between Wenders and Bausch, who were both leading lights in the West German generation of the 1960s who began as influential artists in their own right from the 1970s onwards (think also of the artist Gerhard Richter and that most obtuse of filmmakers, Werner Herzog). But when Bausch died from cancer in June 2009 at the age of 68, Wenders initially abandoned the project, only to change his mind when Bausch’s dancers and staff in the Wuppertal Tanztheater, some of whom had been working alongside her for decades, urged him to carry on.

The documentary is both a tribute and a rejoinder. Four key pieces from Bausch’s career are recreated, shot primarily on the stage, but smaller extra solo and paired works make use of the streets and parks of Wuppertal and even on a riverbank and the edge of a quarry. They include her take on Stravinsky’s The Rites of Spring, but lest we merely surrender to the visual wonder, Bausch herself is both seen and heard from, in archival footage and the brief testimonies of her dancers, to remind us of her goals. “All you can do is hint at things,” she cautions, refusing to embrace the grandiose.

After the affected American stillness of Don’t Come Knocking and the unseen on these shores Palermo Shooting, Pina allows the ever curious Wenders room to explore a subject without drifting worryingly off course. Like his earlier, celebrated documentary, 1999’s Buena Vista Social Club, the film is firmly absorbed in the creativity of others. Wenders would have long known the visual pleasure of Bausch’s work, especially in the tactile way she remade the form and composition of a stage: in the film’s final set-piece, Vollmond, the stage is covered in water and the dancer’s fierce engagement turns the liquid into a kind of visual punctuation.

There’s virtually no nod to demands of conventional biography, with Bausch’s professional life the only focus (some of her advice to dancers suggests an elusive presence: “go on searching,” she tells one), but the work is more than worthy of the focus. And if Bausch was intent on offering a new approach for ballet and modern dance, then Wenders has quietly laid down the same challenge to the cinema. 3D feels suddenly human after you use it to watch Pina.