Caught the movie "Pina" in the Colonial Theater in Bethlehem, New Hampshire (now there's a town to visit - more about Bethlehem later!)
The movie, made by Wim Wenders, is about the German dance choreographer Pina Bausch. Wenders set out to make a documentary about her work three years ago, just before she died very suddenly and unexpectedly of lung cancer, so what was going to be a celebration of the work of a living artist has become a eulogy.
And her work is breathtaking: extraordinary, provocative, witty, beautiful and ugly. Many of the dance sequences in the movie are set in surroundings that contrast sharply with the flowing garments and brilliant colors of the dancers who move through their dream world of emotional and sexual intensity oblivious of traffic and trains. Humor erupts in the form of a dancer with rabbit ears travelling on a public monorail, or a dancer clad in flowing dress and ear muffs brandishing one of those awful hand held leaf blowing machines.
That last sentence illustrates that an artist or performer never knows what aspect of their work is going to connect with the audience: I happen to have a particular antipathy for those awful hand-held leaf blowing machines but I don't suppose either Pina Bausch or Wim Wenders knew that!
The eulogic aspect of Wenders' work is enshrined in short spoken sequences which are memories of Bausch recalled, fresh from the shock of her death, by her dancers, some of whom worked with her for decades.
To my eye, every one of the dancers featured was beautiful, and in this situation, every one of them was tragic. Modern dancers are a sub-set of Homo sapiens, with their slender bodies, etiolated necks and dreamy eyes. In the spoken sequences, each was filmed alone, head and shoulders only, with their words spoken as commentary, the visible face not speaking, just looking unspeakably sad and pensive as their memories of their mentor drifted by on their inner movie screens.
"Pina" didn't satisfy those of my friends who wanted a biography of the choreographer, but factual questions can be answered by a quick Internet search and the experience of the movie itself was not a narrative but a transcendently strange and beautifully animated collage.
Catch it if you can!
http://www.pina-film.de/en/about-the-movie.html
PS: "Pina" is available in 3-D but the Colonial doesn't rise to that!
Friday, August 17, 2012
Thursday, August 2, 2012
Castles in the Sand
I developed my construction skills as a child because we lived quite near the sea. (In Britain one says "sea" not "ocean".)
During summer, a couple of times a month, my mother would drive the family to spend a day at Lavernock, just outside Cardiff, and I'd spend much of the day excavating in the sand, building castles, digging moats, canals and pools and frantically reinforcing my sandy barricades as the tide inexorably eroded them. I knew they wouldn't last, but I built anyway.
Andy Goldsworthy would understand the concept: he builds breath-takingly beautiful ephemeral environmental sculptures. My favorite appears in his 2001 movie "Rivers and Tides" where he struggles to complete an ice sculpture for the rising sun to pierce, in the sure and certain knowledge that that same rising sun will melt his creation into oblivion. He built pyramids of stone below the high water mark and left them to be dis-assembled by the rising tide, filming their collapse.
And now the younger generation has changed all that. It was with total oblivion that my grandsons Dodger, 10, and Rascal, 9, spent hours last Friday constructing an intricate landscape of castles, bridges, moats and pools at Sandbar State Park on Lake Champlain in northern Vermont. Lake Champlain. No hint of a tide. Their construction was never in any danger of being inundated by a tides; there are no tides. They builtwith no sense of urgency or impending doom; they built to last. Their work may yet survive.
I remembered when first I swam in fresh water. I was 13 when I dived into that river in Switzerland. The clarity and lightness of fresh water was a revelation. Each splash was a fountain of pure crystaline droplets, unhampered by the thick suspended solids of the sea. It felt clear and pure and light, unlike the sticky cling of salt water.
During summer, a couple of times a month, my mother would drive the family to spend a day at Lavernock, just outside Cardiff, and I'd spend much of the day excavating in the sand, building castles, digging moats, canals and pools and frantically reinforcing my sandy barricades as the tide inexorably eroded them. I knew they wouldn't last, but I built anyway.
Andy Goldsworthy would understand the concept: he builds breath-takingly beautiful ephemeral environmental sculptures. My favorite appears in his 2001 movie "Rivers and Tides" where he struggles to complete an ice sculpture for the rising sun to pierce, in the sure and certain knowledge that that same rising sun will melt his creation into oblivion. He built pyramids of stone below the high water mark and left them to be dis-assembled by the rising tide, filming their collapse.
And now the younger generation has changed all that. It was with total oblivion that my grandsons Dodger, 10, and Rascal, 9, spent hours last Friday constructing an intricate landscape of castles, bridges, moats and pools at Sandbar State Park on Lake Champlain in northern Vermont. Lake Champlain. No hint of a tide. Their construction was never in any danger of being inundated by a tides; there are no tides. They builtwith no sense of urgency or impending doom; they built to last. Their work may yet survive.
I remembered when first I swam in fresh water. I was 13 when I dived into that river in Switzerland. The clarity and lightness of fresh water was a revelation. Each splash was a fountain of pure crystaline droplets, unhampered by the thick suspended solids of the sea. It felt clear and pure and light, unlike the sticky cling of salt water.
Dodger and Rascal know nothing else: our childhood realities were different. Theirs was the unhurried leisure, and mine the consciousness of impending disaster. So are characters formed.
.JPG) |
| Sandbar State Park, Vermont, July 27, 2012 |
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