Pina

Wim Wenders is a German filmmaker (and playwright, author, photographer and producer) who is known for a wide range of movies, both fiction and documentary (Wings of Desire, Paris Texas, The Buena Vista Social Club, to name just two out of many).

His most recent movie is Pina and you can garner a great deal of information about it on its official website.

It's a tribute to a great German dancer and choreographer, Pina, whose Wuppertal dance troupe has gained international recognition. She died in 2009, and the film includes stage versions of some of her dances as well as re-staged versions done on mountains, in the city, in water and so on.

Furthermore it's been filmed in 3-D, and by all accounts is astonishing. You can see an excellent trailer for the movie on the website (give it a moment to appear), in which the style of the movie and the dances are clearly shown.

There are also half a dozen short clips on Vimeo which shown the range of the dancers from strangely slow to crazy in water to romantic on a roadside to this one - frenzy in the ballroom?

PINA (3D) Un film de Wim Wenders - Extrait 1/6 from les films du losange on Vimeo.

Where's the focus?

A certain kind of seriousness is a pitfall when we deal with an artform in a religious context. It arises from several sources: confusing the artform itself with what motivates the artist, insecurity about technical and choreographic skills, and secret uncertainty about the appropriateness of art in church.

These confusions and uncertainties account for the unfortunate self-importance of some dance made for religious settings. It is time for us to admit that the ludicrous stiffness and - dare I say it? - self-absorbed earnestness of this kind of 'religious' dance is not only highly questionable theologically; it is down-right off-putting to those who watch.

We may respond that we are not dancing for the watcher, we are dancing for God. But is that really what we are doing? Surely we do not believe that God needs our dance. We may be helped out of this confusion by remembering that even the Benedictines, those unsurpassed singers of Gregorian chant, emphatically state that they do not chant 'for God;' they do not chant because God somehow needs their chant. To be sure, they chant 'to the glory of God.' But they are quite clear that it is they - the community - not God, who need the healing, soaring, timeless beauty of the chant.

In the same way, it is our communities that need the communication our dancing has to offer. When dance is made to be watched, its primary flow of communication is outward toward real people, people like us.

What I am trying to say is astringently summed up in the comment of a cleryperson about dance he had recently seen in a cathedral liturgy. Very perceptive about the arts in the church, and also aware of his own physical reserve, he expressed his disappointment wit what he had seen by remarking, 'It was so tight and solemn! I could have choreographed it myself.'

This is from pp 34-5 of Performer as Priest and Prophet, the book I wrote about the other day. I found this comment about the Benedictines chanting to the glory of God rather than for the glory of God something that strikes a particular chord with me. When I played in church regularly, I always found it difficult to somehow get myself into a place where I was focusing on God in the playing. What I was mostly focusing on was my own self and my playing and whether it was good, bad or incredible; what I also focused on was the response of the congregation, not to me, but to what the music itself was doing amongst them.

The first of those two is something I suspect most artists have difficulty with: getting yourself out of the road. But there was considerable joy in having a sense that the music and you and the congregation were at one.

On the other hand, being a performer is a gift. The music will be different if you don't perform, if you merely play it. In church, if you don't lead the music, and draw the congregation along in that leading, then things are half-hearted and dull. Whether a performer can ever stand outside him or herself and just let the music take over is something I'm not sure about. I hear great artists saying it happens; I'm not sure that I'm convinced.

Kiss Me Kate

A friend and I are doing the song, Brush up your Shakespeare, from Kiss Me Kate, at a fun concert in December, and I thought I'd better check up on how it's performed in the movie, to get some ideas. I found a copy of the DVD and checked out the song. The two actors, Keenan Wynn and James Whitmore aren't your usual song and dance men, and it shows. Admittedly they're supposed to be slightly off-centre gangsters out to get the money back from an IOU, but a perusal of the entire movie shows that someone, whether it was the director or the actors, decided that their parts should be played in such a way that they both looked spaced out all the time. They're distinctly unfunny, which is surprising, because both of them were excellent actors. Here they just look embarrassed about the whole thing, particularly Whitmore. I suspect the direction is at fault in a good deal of the movie. George Sidney directed dozens of film musicals, many of them successfully, but something's lacking in Kiss Me Kate. Maybe it's the source material (a stage show) that's been hacked around for the movie (checking out the layout of the original stage version this seems likely). Whatever it is, it only occasionally lights up. Ann Miller does a frenetic tap dance in the opening sequence, but has to do it in a room in an apartment where there's very little space. She winds up dancing on the furniture just to give herself some variety. Howard Keel and Kathryn Grayson sing their opening duet as a squabble rather than a love duet, while Cole Porter - played by Ron Randall - appears in this scene and then is never heard from again. 

Perhaps the problem was that the film was made in 3-D and opportunities to throw things at the camera were taken so often that other things suffer. Grayson sings all fourteen verses of I Hate Men (fourteen, or maybe twenty), and does the same thing with it each time - until she throws the metal tankard she's been thumping on the table at the camera. Wunderbar is performed in a cramped dressing room in a theatre that apparently has a stage the size of a stadium - sometimes. And people talking backstage all shout at the top of their voices, as though the audience couldn't possibly hear them. The camera dolly has a distinct wobble on it, and there are several shots in which the camera moves are quite juddery.

Then there are the costumes for the 'play' they're doing. Someone decided that all the men should be dressed in clothes that reveal pretty much everything. Walter Plunkett, who was one of Hollywood's top designers, didn't usually make such a botch-up as this; was it all part of something not quite going right during production? Who knows. 

So what did I like about the movie? The dancing is just superb. Miller's table-top tapping is top-notch, but the best dancing takes place in two major scenes, and both of them have Tommy Rall in them. In the first, he and Miller perform: Why Can't You Behave? Rall doesn't sing in this one, but he does some whiz-bang acrobatic dancing. (Miller isn't too bad, either!). In the second scene, just before the finale, Rall and Miller, Bob Fosse, Bobby Van, Carol Haney and Jeanne Coyne perform an extended piece to From This Moment On (sung in the stage show by totally different characters). Between the acrobatic dancing of the men, and wonderful energy of the women, this is a show-stopper and a half. Everything about this scene is right (except again for that blasted camera dolly) and it deserves to be in the top ten of Hollywood musical dance sequences. 

Kiss Me Kate isn't unenjoyable; just a bit flawed. The great advantage of the DVD version is that you can leave out the bits you don't like...

Chicago

Chicago the movie disappointed me on a number of counts. Never having seen the musical on stage I don’t have any idea how it’s performed there (though I believe the original version was quite different in approach to the later revival in the 90s) so I can’t tell whether it’s the film’s tone or what that didn’t appeal.

The characters are very hard to warm to. Even the cuckolded husband, living as he does in the middle of a bunch of rogues and self-seekers, doesn’t quite call for our empathy, although he’s the only who might. Renee Zellweger loses our sympathy from round about her third scene, and never regains it; Catherine Zeta-Jones doesn’t fare much better, and Richard Gere’s character never comes close to getting it.

And the story seems something of a mish-mash, at least in this version. I’m told that younger cinemagoers don’t like people suddenly bursting into song. I find this hard to believe. Even if The Sound of Music wasn’t still one of the most popular movies in the world, Grease must still be counted amongst younger people as a movie they love. In both of these people burst into song without so much as a by-your-leave, and no one flees the theatre. And MTV is so popular it has its own channel.

Supposedly Moulin Rouge revived audience’s interest in film musicals. If it did, I’d be surprised: I still find it one of the most annoying movies ever made. The constant cutting from shot to shot as though the editor (or the director) was on speed, becomes so irritating that the film is almost impossible to watch.

Chicago, at least in that respect, is better. The fast cutting is there, but not quite on the same manic level as Moulin Rouge. Here at least you can usually get an idea of what the choreography is about; in Moulin Rouge you had no means of doing so.

But to get back to the story: to me there didn’t seem to be a connection between the songs and the story, except insofar as the songs merely restated what the story had already told us, or only added another dimension. They never carried the thing forward in any way.

Some reviewers suggest that the musical side is seen through Zellweger’s eyes, with her imagining her life as a stage presentation. But if that’s the case, how is it that Zeta-Jones begins the film with All That Jazz, a song that has nothing to do with anything else? Furthermore, at that point, Zeta-Jones is supposed to be in jail for having murdered her sister and husband. Why would she be doing a song in a nightclub?

The opening scenes (apart from All That Jazz itself) have a realistic element to them. But after Zellweger has shot her boyfriend, they go off into this half-story, half-musical hybrid that to me never coalesces. Certainly in movie terms the two intertwine very nicely, but it’s a kind of so what?

Zellweger (apart from her perennial pout) is great in the movie, and does the singing and dancing with great skill. Likewise Zeta-Jones. Gere never seems quite as much at home here as he is in Shall We Dance? where his dancing works. He’s no singer, and sounds thin, and the tapdancing scene is dire. (And again, means nothing.)

The costumes go from skimpy to less-than-skimpy. Maybe that’s meant to distract us from the fact that the rest of it is pretty skimpy too.