Pina Bausch and Café Müller on Screen: the mise-en-scène of co-presence of bodies and closed eyes

Abstract:

This article addresses the issue of co-presence of dancing bodies in an excerpt of Café Müller by Pina Bausch through the cinematographic eye of Wim Wenders in Pina (2011). As a theoretical framework for this analysis, essayist and filmmaker Jean-Louis Comolli ‒ mise-en-scène, representation, co-presence ‒ and the film philosophy of difference as proposed by Gilles Deleuze are brought to scene. While shaping itself on relations with time, the empirical object of this analysis traces ruptures and refractions of images as power of representation. From the (im)perfection of the closed eyes in Café Müller to the (re)presentation in a faux raccord of a coalescent image: the eyes of a cinematographic montage as production of presence in dance.

Keywords:
Pina Bausch; Café Müller; Cinema; Co-presence; Representation

Resumo:

O artigo pretende refletir sobre a questão da copresença do corpo dançante no excerto Café Müller, de Pina Bausch, sob o olhar cinematográfico de Wim Wenders em Pina (2011). Como ancoragem teórica, traz-se à cena o ensaísta e cineasta Jean-Louis Comolli ‒ mise-en-scène, representação, copresença ‒ e a filosofia do cinema da diferença de Gilles Deleuze. Ao se moldar sobre as relações com o tempo, o objeto empírico da investigação traça rupturas e refrações das imagens como potência de representação. Da (im)perfeição dos olhos fechados em Café Müller à re(a)presentação em falso-raccord da imagem coalescente: o olhar da montagem cinematográfica como produção de presença em dança.

Palavras-chave:
Pina Bausch; Café Müller; Cinema; Copresença; Representação

Résumé:

L’article a l’intention de réfléchir sur la question de la co-presence du corps qui danse dans l’extrait Café Müller, une création de Pina Bausch, sous le regard cinématographique de Wim Wenders sur Pina (2011). Comme un ancrage théorique, est apporté dans la scène l’essayiste et cinéaste Jean-Louis Comolli ‒ mise en scène, représentation, co-presence ‒ et la philosophie du cinéma de la différence de Gilles Deleuze. La mise en forme des relations avec le temps, l’objet empirique de la recherche, retrace les pauses et les réfractions des images comme une puissance de représentation. De la (im)perfection des yeux fermés dans Café Müller à représentation de faux raccord de l’image coalescent: le regarde du montage comme production de présence dans la danse.

Mots-clés:
Pina Bausch; Café Müller; Cinéma; Co-presence; Représentation

Introduction

When I finished writing Talk to Her and looked back at Pina's face, with her eyes closed [emphasis added], wearing a small petticoat, arms and hands outstretched, surrounded by obstacles (wooden tables and chairs), I had no doubt that this was the image that best represented the limbo in which the protagonists of my story lived. [...] If I had asked for that on purpose, I could not have done better. Pina Bausch had unknowingly created the best doors to get in and out of Talk to Her (Almodóvar, 2002).

In the quote above, Pedro Almodóvar recalls an invitation made to Pina Bausch to participate in the opening scene of his film Talk to Her (2002)¹⁰, with the very intent of making her dance to the work Café Müller¹¹. The performative power of her closed eyes is mentioned and recognized as an oneiric and interstitial co-presence. The space-time rift caused by the mise-en-scène of the absence of a past present in the dance was what, in fact, interested Almodóvar.

The Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini, in turn, invited Bausch to play in his famous film E La Nave Va (1983)¹² the character Lherimia, a blind-born Austro-Hungarian princess. Fellini reviews the reason that led him to make such a proposal to the director/choreographer in an interview with Leonetta Bentivoglio in The Theater of Pina Bausch (1994), translated by Arthur Nestrovski and published on Caderno Mais!, a culture magazine of a daily Brazilian newspaper:

[...] At the end of the show, I went to meet Pina Bausch and had another proof of the luck that happens to me during the preparation of my films. [...] Among the characters that I had not yet encountered on the eve of filming, there was one especially important, an Austro-Hungarian princess, blind from birth. Even I did not know very well what I was looking for, who I wanted, what face, which actress [...]. And in front of me, in the confused and sweaty commotion of the dressing room of the Teatro Argentina, amidst a fluttering of towels and doors opening and closing, my Austrian princess, shy, composed, diaphanous, dressed of the dark. It was Pina Bausch. [...]. With her aristocratic face, tender and cruel, mysterious and familiar, closed in an enigmatic immobility, Pina Bausch smiled at me, to make herself present. What a beautiful face. One of those faces destined to paralyze us, immense, disturbing, on a movie screen (Fellini, 2000, p. 11).

The construction of the mise-en-scène of the closed eyes in Café Müller and the (re)presentation in Pina (2011)¹³ are not a casual trait of the film text by Wim Wenders. In this particular excerpt, memorable and constitutive punctuations of the character honored by the filmmaker come to the surface, not only from verbal testimonies but also embodied by the mediation of the screen.

Who, when and what is spoken are intertwining of presence, co-presence and absence in the documentary text quoted in Pina, since the staged present and the updated/virtualized past are often in a scheme of substitution or duplicated coalescence. In the texture of this narrative instance, reality and fiction are overlapped and enter into friction, as in a mirror game.

The world of complexity and of multiple relations set by Bausch in her work and particularly in Café Müller allowed three different filmmakers - Fellini, Almodóvar and Wenders - the look, neither from inside nor from outside, for the interval, for the poetic interstice created by the artist, from the simple iconic gesture of dancing with closed eyes, just as if “[...] There was always a great conflict between what we want to make clear and what serves us to hide.” (Bausch, 1994 apud Bentivoglio, 1994, p. 19).

What could Wenders purposefully underline or hide in his documentary? In what way and by what means can the Bauschian look upon oneself and Café Müller be stripped of in this film? In an attempt to elucidate these questions in the analysis of a film excerpt, reference is made to a possible dialogue between the essayist and filmmaker Jean-Louis Comolli and the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, being dance the subject of that dialogue, or rather, the co-presence of the dancing body when mediated by mise-en-scène on the cinema screen.

Mise-en-scène and co-presence: on the (im)perfection of the closed eyes in dance and on screen

Jean-Louis Comolli stands for a cinematographic language based on the art of time, in which the issue of presence and absence are two aspects of a double specular. Deleuze (1983), on the other hand, devises an ontology of the cinematographic image and proposes a cinema of difference based on signs updated and revised in light of the General Theory of Signs as proposed by Charles Sanders Peirce. Deleuze distinguishes sensory-motor situations that structure his concept of movement-image, from pure optical (opsigns) and sonorous (sonsigns) situations and ends up with a new category of signs derived from his time-image formulation.

Departing from Deleuze’s philosophical thinking and based on Comolli’s notes on the co-presence of the cinematic mise-en-scène, the very folds of the dancing images are addressed as onirosign powers that endure and slide through pure optical and sonic situations in the documentary Pina, specifically in the film excerpt of Café Müller, the empirical object of the present study. It is worth pointing out at that the images of the dancing bodies on the Wendersian screen are present in space-time, through a montage-cut¹⁴ and cinematic procedures in faux raccord¹⁵, turning dance into a single sign network and at the same time a co-presence of the present and the virtual image.

In Logic of Sense (2011), Deleuze states that time is itself always (re)doubled. The coalescing or specular images slide across the transparency of the sheets of time, awakening through the mise-en-scène of the cinematic co-presence the purest image of time: a crystal image. This type of image explores and subverts one’s own time until it becomes visible and, in this exploring, the first focus is the double character of the present.

According to Henri Bergson in his book Matter and Memory, written in 1896, and Deleuze in his Cinema 2: the Time-Image (1st ed. 1985/2007), an image is always past, at the same time as it is present, being a memory - the mnemosign - which acts in the present. It is the crystal image that enhances the metaphorical and effective existence of a current image and a virtual image in a system of vivid co-presence through the fragments of the montage-cut that open themselves to endless logics or sense boundaries.

It seems that Deleuze’s assertion is endorsed by Comolli when he asks: “Is it not the cinema that holds the link even in the description of the disappearance of the bond? Reshape the fragments. Redirect the meaning. Reconstruct the connection” (Comolli, 2008c, p. 101). Present, past, memorial records, embodied testimonies, Pina Bausch and Café Müller: the mise-en-scène of closed eyes to recreate the reality of the stage-screen, without distorting its theatrical performative aspects. Co-presence as the power of meaning in becoming.

In this article, the term becoming contrasts the concept of becoming as understood in Deleuze’s philosophy, that is, the permanent movement that acts as a rule, being able to create and transform everything that exists in its own interval/process of constant change. Deleuze states that there is nothing beyond the power of becoming. Beings and their existences would not be truths in their singular or identical conditions nor would these criteria point to the ‘sense of the real’. In Difference and Repetition (1988), Logic of Sense (1982) and Thousand Plateaus v. 4 (1997), Deleuze suggests that beings and things affirm themselves in their multiplicities of the real/truth. The world emerges from this concept and/in its multiple powers: open and qualitative truths, in full becoming. The Deleuzian becoming is located in the cracks, in the breaches, in the rhizomatic openings of multiple senses.

Filmmaker Maya Deren in her essay Cinema: the creative use of reality (2012), also seems to be aware of this immense sense of the potential in becoming that originates from a process of assemblage and subverts time. Deren defines cinema as the language of time, the art of image-time:

The montage of a film creates a sequential relation that provides a new or particular meaning for images according to their function: it establishes a context, a form that transfigures without distorting its aspect, diminishes its reality and authority, or impoverishes that variety of potential functions that are the characteristic dimensions of reality (Deren, 2012, p. 12).

Comolli, like Deren, also addresses time and reality in cinema in his essay Documentary Journey to the Land of the Head Shrinkers (2008a). When deepening a conception of co-presence in a collision scheme, he acknowledges that this specular double is in fact the very mise-en-scène of cinema, the art of time:

It turns out that not only the movie scene - of filming - is a co-presence of bodies, of the eyes (actors, spectators) and of the recording machines, but what is called mise-en-scène in the cinema comes ultimately to work this first presence already as the absence to come: in the screen, in fact, everything that was present to be filmed can only be represented, presented as absence of a past present. This means that the action of the cinematographic scene is that of properly to foreshadow the moment of absence in order to intensify through it (the absence) the moment of presence, to intensify, in short, the presence of bodies according to the promise of their next absence. The image of the body of the absent author, though represented, responds and perhaps secretly corresponds to the real body of the spectator; Presence, it is true, but as absent from itself because it is projected towards a screen. In cinema, in any case, presence and absence are in a tourniquet (Comolli, 2008a, p. 146).

In his Steamy Light of a Dead Astro (2008b) essay, Comolli asserts that cinema, as an artistic language, creatively uses the reinvention of space-time through montage and “makes it sensitive, perceptible and sometimes directly visible what one does not see [emphasis added]: the passage of time in the faces and in the bodies” (Comolli, 2008b, p. 113). The seen that is not seen, but perceived. The author calls decoy the montage procedure that exposes the here-and-now of the true inscription in the here and now of the projection: “what is recorded in the present in the filmic tape and that unfolds in the present on the screen of the projection is only the illusion of a synchronicity” (Comolli, 2008b, p. 113).

In the present study, it should be noted that the inscription of filmic time-space is based on the notion of co-presence of the body and/in image by (re)presentation.

In the first film excerpt [timing- 17 m.:39'] to be analyzed, Pina Bausch presents elsewhere in time the theme of the closed eyes in one of the most famous scenes of Café Müller. In this operation, the montage of documentary evidence - fragments of audiovisual memory records and preexisting affective testimonies - opposes to the montage in continuity, and by means of the procedure in faux raccord the film device is purposely stripped. In the foreground, one observes a dark place and some people sitting with their backs to the camera. On the side of the filmic frame, in profile, a social actor wearing a black shirt lights a cigarette and smokes next to a projector. At the bottom of the frame/scene dancing images are projected. At this moment, it is possible to recognize the play Café Müller. The camera slowly approaches Pina Bausch´s face, inserted in the excerpt by means of a collage of recollected images that, possibly, allude to the original performance of 1978, in Wuppertal. With a traveling movement - from the right to the left on the horizontal level - a frontal approaching of the camera occurs, reaching a close-up of Bausch's face that performs on the screen and remains with the eyes closed.

Wenders, from this primary imaginary source - mnemosign - makes a tribute to the dance artist, metaphorically placing his cast watching it on the screen as if the updated reminiscence led them to ask: who is/was Pina Bausch? Virtual/current image? The answer lies implicitly: Pina Bausch was/is the dance artist who worked/works from the concept of tanztheater.

According to Jochen Schmidt (1992) and Ciane Fernandes (2000), in this process of creation the fusion between the elements of dance, theater and the interaction between the arts is fundamental. For Norbert Servos (1984) and Fabio Cypriano (2005), Bauschian’s works are syncretic, open to countless meanings and without previous connotations. Dancers often represent themselves by creating a mirrored double play between reality and performance. Often, her creative motto is the tension between men and women; the inability to effect possible communicative connections. In this search for oppositions, opposing effects and double perspective, the aesthetic reasoning of the German avant-garde artist arises: the fragmentation and repetition of the gesture as generators of the scenic collage proposed in her works.

On the structure of creation in dance, from the method of collage, Juliana Carvalho Franco da Silveira in Dramaturgy in the dance-theater of Pina Bausch (2015), suggests that the works of the Wuppertal Tanztheater arise from a great mosaic of answers given by the dancers to the questions posed by Bausch. For Silveira, “when one scene is connected to another, they are re-signified and the result is the proliferation of the senses created by the performance” (Silveira, 2015, p. 64).

Thus, one would ask: What would be the meaning or relevance of the closed eyes in a work such as Café Müller? And, in order to clarify this question, in this excerpt, Wenders seems to appropriate the very voice of the honored person, who comes to the screen to verbalize the allegory of the look.

In a filmic segment subsequent to that described above, other black-and-white archive images are depicted, delineating Bausch, who, with tight hair, wears a light color blazer and has a more mature appearance than in the previous images. Framed in the foreground and at the center of the picture, Bausch's voice and gesture are synchronized. The co-presence of voice and body merge into a current/virtual statement and one of the results of this mise-en-scène is transcribed below:

I danced Café Müller… We all kept our eyes closed. When we did it again, I could not feel the same thing... A feeling that was so important to me... Suddenly I realized that it makes a lot of difference, being with my eyes closed ... If I look down [at this moment there is synchrony between gesture and word - when she pronounces 'down', Pina looks down and points to the index finger of her right hand] or looks up [the same synchronic procedure between gesture and word happens], this way... It made all the difference. The right feeling came at the same time... It's amazing how crucial this is. The smallest detail is important... It's a language you learn to read (Pina, 2011).

After a new jump-cut procedure, Wenders goes back in time and reinserts the dance artist, with her eyes closed and wearing a white camisole, in an explicit scene of Café Müller. The image displayed on the screen is one of Bausch’s most well-known mnemosigns performing this piece, possibly when it first premiered in 1978. This filmic procedure transports the reading to the levels and boundaries of the supposed creation of a Wendersian imagetic co-presence, implied in his documentary registry argumentation, fragmented, from the formal perspective of a mosaic or a time-bound collage.

Those bifacial images account for a time that is not chronological, since the temporal jumps become evident and purposeful through a cinematic montage-cut effect. At this moment, the dancer becomes the kinetic iconic emblem: the writing of a cinematographic mnemosign. The artifice of temporal anamorphosis makes room for the (re)presentation of the chronic Deleuzian time in detriment of the restricted and chronological time. Pina Bausch talks about the eyes closed in a certain time folding. Cut. Pina Bausch performs with her eyes closed and shred, after the cut, any balance state provided by a continuous montage. The Wendersian montage-cut attests to what Deleuze alludes to as an artifice of remembrance-image or mnemosign: “a new intersection, a new rupture of causality, which in turn splits with the preceding, in a set of non-linear relations” (Deleuze, 2007, p. 65).

For Comolli, in his essay Studies in Toulouse: representation, mise-en-scène, mediatization (2008c): “of course it is a device, a system, a writing. A representation is something that is manufactured with me and that I manufacture with the other. In reality, it is the whole relation of the visible to the invisible that articulates around this return of the looking to itself” (Comolli, 2008c, p. 98).

Pina Bausch, when (re)presenting herself in the film Pina, returns the look to herself in some other time. In the analyzed film section, therefore, the art of time emanates from the coalescing co-presence relations between the current and the virtual images.

Image and (re)presentation in Café Müller: the sheets of the Deleuzian time

Deleuze in Cinema 2: the Time-Image (2007) states that an image is not a mental representation, but light-moving matter. In short: an image exists in itself, always as a power in becoming. Peirce (1974), in turn, states that an image establishes itself as an iconic sign, although it may be indicial and symbolic according to the type and context in which it is represented.

By admitting that the Deleuzian movement-image is configured as a ‘reality’ anchored more in essence and diegesis than in the virtual or potential, it is possible to infer that the time-image, in turn, is configured as a kind of transmutation of mimesis, in which ‘to imitate is not simply to try to reproduce reality/nature’. In Pina, the kinetic iconic gesture can complement nature, but without being confused with it. In this sense, mimesis appears, at least in this empirical object of investigation, as transcendence towards an ability to recreate reality. The notion of co-presence, in this case, absorbs the essence of things but, at the same time, invigorates them by the relation of an interpretive action of the reader/spectator to the dancing body object - Pina Bausch with closed eyes - in Café Müller. The montage-cut simulates, in faux raccord, a real/possible world from the actual/virtual real mnemosigns, (re)presenting Bausch and her eyes closed in anamorphic landscapes and diverse chronic times.

Semioticist Lucrecia Ferrara alludes to this question in her text Reading without words (2001), when she affirms that all representation “is an image, a simulacrum of the world from a system of signs, that is, in the last or first instance, all representation is a gesture that encodes the universe [...] the process of communication is the universe itself, the reality itself” (Ferrara, 2001, p. 7). From the material dimension of this discourse it is possible to ponder that the meaning of a signage¹⁶ always comes embedded in the very mode of representation of discourse.

The documentary Pina and/in its excerpt Café Müller are an attempt to represent the real/reality. In this reasoning, the body in dancing movement, iconic and kinetic as real/referent, is crossed by the fiction of the mise-en-scène of the filmic co-presence. The argument to be made explicit is that the dancing bodies extracted from the Café Müller excerpt in Pina, (re)structuring from the Deleuzian time-image, are also updated in this signal path, in a pure crystal image. And such process is only perceptible through the faux raccord options of the Wendersian montage-cut. Wenders, with his poetics of fragmentation of the documentary narrative, ends up crowning with success the opsigns and sonsigns of the Deleuzian time-image.

Café Müller: the time-image, the eye and the look as limit for the production of co-presence

According to Comolli, the eye is at the edge of an image. “The look is also a production” (Comolli, 2014c, p. 98). This production of presence has a reflective dimension as if a cinema screen could do nothing more than show us the world as a production of the look. “Return on yourself, reflection. Repetition. Review. Double gaze” (Comolli, 2008d, p. 82). This temporal look, would it be the mise-en-scène?

As the eye is in the frame, the look is in the film, the filmmaker’s look and the viewer’s look. To put on the stage is to be put on the scene. It is to be placed on the scene by the very constitution of a scene. The one I film looks at me. What he (she) looks at when looking at me (listening) to him (her). Looking at my gaze, that is, one of the perceptible forms of my mise-en-scène, he (she) gives me back the echo of mine, returns my mise-en-scène as it reverberated in it. What makes the subject filmed live with this mise-en-scène, inhabit it, appropriates it (Comolli, 2008d, p. 82).

In the segment examined further below, reference is made to the notion of the crystalline time-image in its pure optical (opsigns) and sonorous (sonsigns) situations allied to the auto mise-en-scène issue described by Comolli (2014d, p. 85) in the sense of “placing the body under the look, of the body's game in space and in the time defined by the gaze of the other (the scene)”.

In this scene game in which Deleuze’s chronic time is present through the faux raccord procedure, the social actors of the Wuppertal Tanztheater not only inhabit different landscapes, but also proclaim the creation of a new relationship in which the past is updated, as in a specular face in the action presentified, without necessarily the intermediation between the remembered/virtual and the current. It is worth highlighting and reinforcing a statement by Deren (2012), for whom different people filmed making the same gesture at different times and spaces could, through a careful set-up, have unified the presence of mise-en-scène in this supposed separation between fractions of scene. Such idea corroborates the arguments set up so far.

In the film segment [timing- 35min.:10’], the scene fraction is of great relevance to the exploration of the mise-en-scène of co-presence. In a close-up shot, dancer Aida Vainieri moves from the left side to the right of the film frame towards the dancer Dominique Mercy who, in turn, remains static. Vainieri walks with her eyes closed [emphasis added]. Her black hair is loose, and she wears a white camisole. Mercy wears a green long-sleeved shirt. Vainieri approaches Mercy and kisses him. From a close-up framing one notices that the two dancers keep their eyes closed. All the movement happens in silence.

Next, a jump-cut interrupts the scene and from an image overlay procedure - fade in - the action of the kiss goes fading from the picture frame, while Vainieri - focused in close-up - bursts into the screen. At this moment, a voice-off¹⁷ statement is heard: “So many times I danced Café Müller with Pina! So many times have I seen her hair, her back, her arms ... So many times, with closed eyes [emphasis added], I heard her, knowing she heard us all ... Even closed, her eyes saw everything ... [emphasis added]” (Pina, 2011). A new jump-cut is triggered, and the displayed image then leads to an updated or (re)presented scene from the Café Müller excerpt, with part of the current Wuppertal Tanztheater cast.

From a general overview frame, it is possible to observe in the staged-location¹⁸, on a theater stage, a round black wooden table with social actors Dominique Mercy and Michael Strecker, as well as Nazareth Panadero - dressed in a long, dark coat and wearing a red wig. The three characters are sat in their chairs watching, and fallen in front of the table, the dancer Aida Vainieri. The walls and floor of the stage are gray. Some chairs are upright, and others lie down. The scene continues; the three sitting elements get up, leave the scene and suddenly another character is visualized in the filmic field: it is a man, in a dark suit, who put up some fallen chairs in the location. Vainieri gets up and goes to the table that was once occupied by the trio. She stands in front of one of the chairs and begins to undress her white camisole.

With her back to the camera, the dancer sits naked, and rests her torso and her head on the table. From this action, an image overlap takes place that transports the same movement of Vainieri to another staged-location and to another performer who assumes her ‘space/place’ in a type of - virtual/actual - specular substitution evoked cinematographically by the procedures of jump-cut and faux raccord. It is the dancer Mailou Airaudo who performs the same gesture/performatic action on a table and chair placed in the bed of a stream of crystalline waters.

Airaudo is sat in one of the four black chairs. The table has the surface covered by a transparent plate. In one of the chairs lays the white camisole she has just undressed, in a kind of symbolically duplicated act of Vainieri. From an approximation of the camera and an elevation of the filming angle, in plongée, the transparent glass perceives the flow of water passing under the table while the naked torso and the head of Airaudo are framed to the right side of the filmic angle. A few seconds elapse with this image, while listening to the diegetic and intra-field sound - flow/stream of water - the camera is approaching more and more the face of Airaudo until framing it in a closed plane. The dancer keeps her eyes closed during the whole take time.

In the montage-cut proposed by Wenders in this mise-en-scène of co-presence of current and virtual images, the sensory-motor scheme and the notions and (re)actions of cause and effect are broken to give place to pure optical (opsigns) and sonorous (sonsigns) situation. The dancers, Vainieri and Airaudo, become a double speculum, a dream power, both of whom have performed the same role/character of Café Müller in different times.

Deleuze corroborates this reasoning by claiming that dance arises directly as an oneiric-power: “dance is no longer just a movement of the world but a passage from one world to another, entrance into another world, effraction and exploration” (Deleuze, 2007, p. 80).

As for the oneiric power of the mnemosign ‘closed-eyes’ in both scenes and in both interpreters, it can be said that each image completes itself, updates the preceding one and is updated by the following as a repetitive recurring structure or in looping. Airaudo was the first dancer to dance the role in question in the Company and her presence on the metaphorical temporal flow in the course of the stream does not fail to allude to the sheets of the time of the co-presence of the Wuppertal Tanztheater.

In this excerpt, Wenders, by opting for the montage-cut, involves the interpreters of themselves in the passage from the narrative to the exploratory in becoming.

In this (re)presentation of the excerpt, one can notice a kind of mise-en-scène of the discourse of co-presence in which the event pre-exists the narrative. The two social actresses/performers, the montage-cut effects associated with the faux raccords are not triggered to communicate a present, past, or future situation.

The described scenes, therefore, would function as a kind of dream or pseudo-dreams with infinite metamorphoses in their interstices of multiple meanings in ‘becoming’ to be constructed by the co-presence of the reader/spectator.

Concluding remarks

From an analysis of the excerpt Café Müller inscribed and staged in the film Pina by Wim Wenders, anchored by a philosophical dialogue between Gilles Deleuze and Jean-Louis Comolli, an attempt was made to understand the issue of a probable co-presence of the dancing body when mediated by the mise-en-scène on/of the screen. The motto for the course of this analysis fell on the eye and the gaze, or rather on the recurrence of the closed Bauschian eyes as a power of construction of meanings in becoming, when shaped on the relations with the cinematographic time. Through cinematographic procedures such as the faux raccord traces and the intense jump-cuts, it was possible to identify and think of the ruptures and refractions of the scenic and performatic images as power of (re)presentation mediated by the cinematographic montage as a production of co-presence in dance.

The construction of the mise-en-scène of the closed eyes in Café Müller (re)presented in Pina (2011) is a fundamental feature in the film text by Wim Wenders. In the two excerpts analyzed, the current and virtual images, constitutive of the dance artist, came to light from verbal testimonies and also embodied by the mediation of the screen.

The moving bodies of Pina Bausch and the social actors of the Wuppertal Tanztheater in physicalizing the qualitative power of the pure opsigns and sonsigns of the Deleuzian time-image celebrate the dance itself in its opening of senses. The dancing kinetic icons mediated by the cinema screen, without any commitment to the real, open themselves to the imaginative interstice. Both dance and cinema, in this instance, (re)present themselves to each other and reuse reality in a creative and pure being.

The images of the dancing bodies in an effraction scheme and temporal exploration intertwine in space-time, making dance in the same signal mesh of reversible and chronic order the current and virtual image. The reverberation of the dance with the closed eyes gesture takes place at different moments in the filmic text. However, the gesture transforms itself into a mise-en-scène of co-presence of itself as an iconic power.

It is precisely in this way that Pina Bausch and the social actors of the Wuppertal Tanztheater, with their eyes closed, slide through and beyond the time and space of (re)presentation of documentary fiction and come to dance in our imaginary.

Referências

• ALMODÓVAR, Pedro. Intimidad y Espectáculo. Página oficial de Pedro Almodóvar. 2002. (site). Disponível em: ˂Disponível em: ˂http://www.clubcultura.com/clubcine/clubcineastas/almodovar/hable-conella /intimidad2.htm ˃. Acesso em: 31 mar. 2017.
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• BAUSCH, Pina. Entrevista concedida originalmente à autora. In: BENTIVOGLIO, Leonetta. O Teatro de Pina Bausch. Tradução Maria José Casal-Ribeiro. Lisboa: Acarte/Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 1994 [1985]. P. 19.
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• COMOLLI, Jean-Louis. Viagem Documentária aos redutores de cabeça. In: COMOLLI, Jean-Louis. Ver E Poder - A Inocência Perdida: cinema, televisão, ficção, documentário. Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG, 2008a. P. 143-160.
• COMOLLI, Jean-Louis. Luz Fulgurante de um Astro Morto. In: COMOLLI, Jean-Louis. Ver E Poder - A Inocência Perdida: cinema, televisão, ficção, documentário . Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG , 2008b. P. 108-114.
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• COMOLLI, Jean-Louis. Carta de Marselha: sobre a auto mise-en-scène In: COMOLLI, Jean-Louis. Ver E Poder - A Inocência Perdida: cinema, televisão, ficção, documentário . Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG , 2008d. P. 81-85.
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• 1
  Hable con Ella (2002) is a Spanish movie, written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar that debates issues such as rape and above all the coma state: the interval/interstice between life and death. In this film, fragments of two works by Pina Bausch are shown: Café Müller (1978) and Masurka Fogo (1998).

• 2
  Café Müller - a choreographic piece by Pina Bausch, for the Wuppertal Tanztheater. World premier: 20 May 1978. For more information on Café Müller, refer to: <http://www.pina-bausch.de/en/pieces/cafe_mueller.php>. Accessed 15 Apr. 2017.

• 3
  E La Nave Va(1983) is an Italian film directed by Federico Fellini. The film shows surrealistic events taking place aboard a luxury ship on which some friends of a deceased opera singer are gathered for her funeral.

• 4
  Readers are invited to watch the film Pina before/during/after reading this article. It is a 106-minute long movie and in joint partnership among Germany, France and the United Kingdom. The film documentary was made by Wim Wenders’ production company Neue Road Movies (Berlin), in collaboration with the Wuppertal Tanztheater - ZDF/ZDF theaterkanal und ARTE. It was premiered on March 23, 2012. Source: Wim Wenders´ official website. Available at: <http://www.wim-wenders.com/movies/movies_spec/pina/pina.htm>. Accessed 28 Mar. 2017.

• 5
  Montage-Cut is a dry cut from one plane to another by a simple collage, without the raccord [rule of continuity] being marked by a rhythmic effect or structural tricks. The passage from one filmic segment to another is marked by an abrupt cutting, purposely in order to avoid logical threads and transparency effects in the narrative.

• 6
  The faux raccord movement is an (intentional) change of plan that runs away from the transparent logic of continuity that seeks to transcend the logic of meaning. This type of procedure seeks to show varied points of view and perspectives of the image. It is admitted that it is false [faux, in French] because it explores another unconventional possibility of truth or real, enhancing a qualitative becoming.

• 7
  Signage is a neologism created by Décio Pignatari (2004) to avoid the use of the term language when referring to non-verbal phenomena, such as photography, television, theatre, and, in this case, dance, or specifically, the contemporary cinema or documentary (audio-haptic-visual system).

• 8
  The voice-off is a cinematographic procedure in which the testimony given lies outside the filmic frame. In this testimony, it can only be inferred that it is the voice of the character focused on close-up, because the character does not move his/her lips and does not articulate any words or lip sounds when addressing the reader/viewer.

• 9
  The staged-location, a concept proposed by Fernão Pessoa Ramos (2008), is distinguished from the staging-built by the fact that the taking of the scene in the documentary is performed in the context where the subjects or social actors that are filmed live their lives. The realization of this particular excerpt seems to explore this tension between staging, re-presentation and the world in its daily life.

• This unpublished text, translated by Maggie Morgana Gonçalves and proofread by Luzia Araújo and Ananyr Porto Fajardo, is also published in Portuguese in this issue.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  Jul-Sep 2018
• Date of issue
  Sept 2018

History

• Received
  03 Sept 2017
• Accepted
  02 Feb 2018