Pina Bausch: movies

Although Talk to Her is probably her most famous screen appearance, there are many other films with and about Pina Bausch besides Pedro Almodóvar’s melodrama. Between the two performances by the choreographer who passed away in 2009, Odisseia presents – in association with Fundação de Serralves and Midas Filmes – a film cycle focusing on Pina Bausch’s creative practise. Programme highlights include the Portuguese pre-premiere of Dancing Dreams by Anne Linsel and Rainer Hoffman and Wim Wenders’s very recent film Pina.

Organisation: TNSJ, Centro Cultural Vila Flor, Theatro Circo, Teatro de Vila Real
In association with Fundação de Serralves, Midas Filmes

Serralves Auditorium
7 MAY 2011 (Sat), 16:00
Die Klage der Kaiserin
[The Complaint of an Empress]
Directed by Pina Bausch (1989)
Running time: 1:43

Café Müller
Directed by Pina Bausch (1985)
Running time: 55’

The cycle dedicated to Pina Bausch opens with two films directed by the German choreographer herself who, in inventing a new form of dance, also created a singular theatrical genre: dance theatre. But Die Klage der Kaiserin and Café Müller have very different characteristics. In Café Müller Pina Bausch reproduces on film what is probably the most autobiographical of her choreographies, a piece that reconstructs a personal memory of the post-war period and her father’s café, where she spent many hours. In Die Klage der Kaiserin she makes the city of Wuppertal (where she resided with her company) her stage: woods, the famous suspended railway, a carpet shop, a greenhouse, the city centre... The changing of the seasons punctuates the organisation of the film, while its internal structure reflects the particular way of working developed by the choreographer in the first half of the 1970s.

Serralves Auditorium
8 MAY 2011 (Sun), 16:00
Damen und Herren ab 65
[Ladies and Gentlemen over 65]
Directed by Lilo Mangelsdorf (2002)
Running time: 1:10

National pre-premiere
Dancing Dreams*
Directed by Anne Linsel, Rainer Hoffman (2010)
Running time: 1:29

An exalting and lively documentary, Dancing Dreams follows a year of rehearsals for Kontakthof, a piece from 1973 recreated with a group of fourteen-year-olds from Wuppertal. As well as a testimony of how this experience with amateurs reached its maturity, Anne Linsel and Rainer Hoffman’s documentary is a sensitive survey of today’s adolescents, their fears and wishes. This is the raw material the choreographer worked with in the rehearsal studio to recreate a classic about human emotions. Dancing Dreams forms a precious diptych with Ladies and Gentlemen over 65, a documentary about the recreation of the same piece some years before with seniors, which earned Lilo Mangelsdorf the German Cinema Critics’ Association prize for Best Documentary.

UCI Arrábida
8 MAY 2011 (Sun), 21h30
National pre-premiere
Pina*
Directed by Wim Wenders (2011)
Running time: 1:46

The premiere of Wim Wenders’s Pina last March at Théâtre de la Ville in France was received with an enthusiastic standing ovation. This is the German director’s first 3D film as well as the first 3D film about dance. On April 8th the film was distinguished with a Lola – the most important award in German cinema – in the category of Best Documentary. The magazine Mouvement describes it as a “truly great film” where “in every moment we feel and breathe Pina Bausch’s gaze and smile, with some archival footage, rare and radiant”. Her words are constantly present, like a watermark, in what is clearly a film from Wim to Pina: “Dance, dance... Otherwise, we are lost”.

Serralves Auditorium
9 MAY 2011 (Mon), 21:30
Un jour, Pina a demandé
Directed by Chantal Akerman (1983)
Running time: 58’

In Un jour, Pina a demandé – a film produced in the 1980s for a television series dedicated to the great references of modern dance – Chantal Akerman follows Pina Bausch’s work from city to city and from festival to festival, capturing the most intense moments, filming almost on top of the dancers’ bodies. Without ever lapsing into a style of reporting or journalistic documentary, the Belgian filmmaker shares, through her lens, the passionate and political violence expressed in Pina Bausch’s choreographies.

* With Portuguese subtitles.