Le Sacre du printemps by Pina Bausch

Le Sacre du printemps

Music by Igor Stravinsky

Choreography by Pina Bausch

L’Arche Editeur, 2012

ISBN: 9782851817747

Just the half an hour or so, that’s all it lasts, but it rapidly becomes unbearably involving even so.

It’s due to the intensity of the drama, the way you’re drawn into the urgency for renewal, how it unremittingly builds and builds.  You feel it in the pulse of your blood.  And for renewal to come about a chosen one, a sacrifice/scapegoat, is needed.  Who will wear the red dress, and dance unto death?

It is the tenderness that scares the others off, those who decline the dress.  A hand reaching out to caress, let’s say.  Or it may be what they read in the man’s face: desire, need, hunger.  Death wants only the very brave.

This last dance is, as well as being thrilling and climactic and incredibly moving, simply an incredible performance.  For how do you attain in dance an absolute abandonment (one culminating in the loss of life itself) while retaining always at least a crumb of control?  Death may no longer be a taboo; but dying is.

There is an elemental quality to the staging, in keeping with the nature of the ballet and Stravinsky’s disconcerting score: the men in black trousers, the women in white ethereal dresses (a nod to Café Muller perhaps), looking for all the world like two antagonistic packs, hunting each other.  The earth lies strewn at their feet.  A red garment is the stark battle line between them.  In Bausch’s choreography, whose subtle geometry is here apparent, their movements reach for the fluidity of ballet but anxiety always fractures the harmony of the moment.  Dance constantly morphs into drama and violence.

This performance was filmed in Wuppertal in 1978, three years after its premiere there, and it still feels dangerous and edgy even now.  There is an accompanying booklet with the DVD, which includes black and white stills from the film and a first-hand account by Jo Ann Endicott, one of Bausch’s dancers, of being involved in those first productions.  And Cocteau writes about the first responses to Le Sacre du printemps in Paris in May 1913, and of his friendship with Stravinsky and Diaghilev.  The booklet is in French, German and English.

The publisher’s description of the DVD and booklet can be read here.

Die Klage der Kaiserin

Die Klage der Kaiserin

(The Plaint of the Empress)

By Pina Bausch

L’Arche Editeur, August 2011

ISBN: 9782851817563

This is Pina Bausch’s only genuine film – as distinct from, say, a film recording of a dance that had previously been performed on stage – and it can best be described as a strange and surreal mess.

Dance figures prominently, as you would expect, and there is music throughout; but the action takes place off-stage: in woods and buses, on hills and rooftops…  There are jump cuts, close-ups and other cinematic devices.  A close-up of a woman’s face, wrinkles undisguised, as her younger lover’s fingers walk along it becomes, in Bausch’s hands, a dance in itself.

Some people have suggested that the film is about our connection with the earth and, yes, there is something to that.  Yet it’s also about the female body: how it is controlled and tamed and presented.  It is about both of these (related?) orientations at once.  Take the woodland scene where the tree trunks are numbered, prior to being timbered; and then compare it with the one where the bride severely cinches the belt on her wedding dress, counting on her fingers how many seconds she can keep it that tight without fainting.

Adventures crazy and images weird are everywhere to be seen, most centreing on culling/slaughter or birth/regeneration.  A woman squeezes milk from her own breasts and then slurps it up.  Her sister runs in high heels, lost and crying for her mother, as Billie Holliday sings ‘Strange Fruit’.  One of my favourite scenes sees a shepherdess tending her flock in evening dress and heels, whilst swigging from a bottle and holding a black lamb in her arms.  Later we see her comatose on the ground, her flock milling and spilling around her.  It reminds you of one of Brueghel’s proverb paintings.

In short, it is a poetic film: many images will stay with you, teasing and delighting the mind, but there isn’t a narrative as such, so don’t go looking for one.  Also, when dance does occur – the tango in midsection where we see just see legs and red shoes or the joyous turn that ends the film, a calypso song on the jukebox – it is terrific.

Open the accompanying booklet and you’ll see some black and white film stills, an impressionistic synopsis of the film, plus various photos taken of Pina Bausch as she worked on it.  Furthermore, there is an interview with her which took place in 1990, shortly after the film was released.  She talks mainly about her approach to cinema.

All in all, it’s an attractive and worthwhile package.

The publisher’s description of the DVD and booklet can be read here.

Café Müller by Pina Bausch

Café Müller

By Pina Bausch

L’Arche Editeur, September 2010

ISBN: 9782851817273

Café Müller was created and first performed in 1978, thirty four years ago: a fair distance in time.  It still lives.

This film of the dance (or the psychodrama, which may be a better description) was made in May 1985 at the Opera house in Wuppertal, then broadcast on German TV in December of that year.  Pina Bausch directed the film and she’s on stage here too, taking the same role that she took in the original production, some seven years before.

It begins with a lone woman dressed in an ethereal gown, edging into a cluttered room.  There is very little space.  Chairs are strewn around and she bumps into them: perhaps she is blind?  To avoid obstacles, to stay safe from pain, she keeps to the wall, clinging to the margins.  The woman is played by Pina Bausch.

Another woman, similarly dressed, enters the room shortly thereafter and goes towards the chairs, which are (most of the time) cleared out of her way by a man.  He watches over and makes a path for her, but he can become impatient with her fumbling. There’s an edge, a possibility of violence or desertion.

You could view the women as two halves of the same whole, or perhaps they represent two choices (to put it starkly, Yes or No) towards life, the world, love, intimacy…

One scene haunts the mind, still.  A man holds a woman in his arms then drops her, whether through tiredness, carelessness or cruelty.  At once she gets up and clings to him.  Again he holds her, lifts her up into his arms but drops her.  And again, after she falls, she stands up and clings to him.  It is cruel, funny, pathetic, indescribably sad – all these at once.  The cycle goes on for so long that eventually you pray for it to end, as all the while Purcell’s mournful aria (‘Remember me, but oh forget my fate!’) drives despairingly on.

Herve Guibert wrote of Café Müller that it leaves you ‘with the heart wounded and bandaged, bathed in an emanation of tears’, which is one way of putting it.  In the same review (it is one of six articles in the booklet that accompanies the DVD) he goes on to explain:

It is not Pina Bausch who wounds the heart; it was already hurt, but the wound had been forgotten, written off as foolish, romantic or narcissistic, and Pina Bausch, through the bodies of her dancers, reminds us of the reality and the vitality of that wound.  (77)

Of course, viewing Café Müller on DVD can never be the same as seeing it live on stage: your eye is curtailed, there are things you cannot see.  Even so, in this form it still has the power to move and one advantage is that there’s time to reflect on its rich meanings.

The publisher’s description of the DVD and booklet can be read here.

Johnny Got His Gun

Johnny Got His Gun (DVD)
Directed by Dalton Trumbo
USA, 1971
Arrow Films, March 2010

With the release of this unique and brilliant film, an unnerving and excoriating journey awaits the intrepid viewer.

Trumbo wrote the novel, Johnny Got His Gun, at the close of the 1930s.  This inventive adaptation followed in 1971.  Quite a time difference.

Joe (Timothy Bottoms) had a normal life once, but it has become stunted through war and terrible injury.  He exists now through memory only, in a kind of hypnagogic coma, a dreamlike delirium.  That we see Joe as a soul in torment and are one with him is Trumbo’s triumph.

There are few films that will touch you as deeply as this one.  On viewing Johnny Got His Gun almost 40 years after its initial release, it more than stands up.  It is a harrowing film and an absolute one-off; it stands apart from virtually everything.

The DVD comes with several special features: the trailer of the film, an alternate scene, an interview with and documentary about Trumbo, the video of Metallica’s ‘One’, a song inspired by the film; and a booklet about Johnny Got His Gun written by Calum Waddell.

It is available now from Arrow Films.  Click here.