DANCING DREAMS offers teens the chance to work with dance-theater legend Pina Bausch
TANZTRÄUME: JUGENDLICHE TANZEN “KONTAKTHOF” VON PINA BAUSCH (DANCING DREAMS: TEENAGERS DANCE PINA BAUSCH’S “CONTACT ZONE”) (Anne Linsel & Rainer Hoffmann, 2010)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Sunday, May 1, 1:00 & Monday, May 2, 6:00
Series runs April 25 – May 2
Tickets: $10, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
From 1973 until her death in 2009, legendary dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch ran Tanztheater Wuppertal, the German company that changed the face of dance theater forever with such seminal productions as Rite of Spring, Café Müller, Danzón, Masurca Fogo, and so many more. In 1978 she staged Kontakthof, collaborating with Rolf Borzik, Marion Cito, and Hans Pop, set to music by Juan Llossas, Charlie Chaplin, Anton Karas, Sibelius, and other composers. In 2000, she revisited the piece with a cast of senior citizens, and eight years later she turned the roles over to a group of Wuppertal high schoolers, most of whom had never heard of her and had never danced before. Director Anne Linsel and cinematographer Rainer Hoffmann follow the development of this very different production in Dancing Dreams, speaking with the eager, nervous participants, who talk openly and honestly about their hopes and desires, as well as with rehearsal directors Jo-Ann Endicott and Benedicte Billet, who do not treat the teens with kid gloves but instead are trying to get them to reach deep inside of themselves and hold nothing back. When Bausch shows up to choose the final cast, telling the teenagers that she doesn’t bite, the tension mounts. Dancing Dreams is an intimate look at the creative process, about dedication and determination and what it takes to be an artist. It suffers at times from feeling too much like a reality television show, mixing American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance with the fictional Glee, but it also offers a last glimpse at Bausch, whose final interview is captured in the film. “You might think I’ve had enough of Kontakhtof,” she says at one point. “But every time it’s a new thing.” Dancing Dreams is screening May 1 & 2 as part of MoMA’s KINO 2011: New Cinema from Germany series, which runs April 27 – May 2 and also includes Gereon Wetzel and Jorg Adolph’s How to Make a Book with Steidl, Tom Tykwer’s Drei (Three), Friedmann Fromm’s Weissensee (The Weissensee Saga: A Berlin Love Story), Florian Cossen’s Das Lied in mir (The Day I Was Not Born), Philip Koch’s Picco, and a Next Generation presentation of short works.
Based on a novel by Ma Shitu, Jiang Wen’s Let the Bullets Fly is a very funny action comedy set during the Warlord Era of the 1920s. After a train robbery doesn’t quite come off as planned, wanted gangster Pocky Zhang (Jiang) and his sidekicks team up with shady swindler Tang (Ge You) and a treasure-hunting woman (Carina Lau) to pose as the new county governor (Zhang) and his team, attempting to take over Goose Town and abscond with its money. But Goose Town already belongs to the crooked Huang Silang (Chow Yun-fat), who is not about to let Zhang take away what’s his. What follows is a goofy battle of wills that involves self-gutting, an idiot body double, some excellent gory violence, and lots of double entendres. A huge critical and commercial success in China, Let the Bullets Fly is way too long at 132 minutes, and the pacing often feels scattershot, perhaps the result of at least six screenwriters having poured out some thirty scripts before Jiang was ready to proceed. Jiang is wonderfully understated as Zhang, while Chow is a hoot as the local mobster whose domain is suddenly threatened. Filled with plenty of sly references and homages to Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns, Let the Bullets Fly is a flawed but entertaining Chinese popcorner.
In Grave Encounters, Sean Rogerson stars as Lance Preston, the host of a ghost-hunter reality TV series who is not averse to slipping locals a little cash to lie about having seen or heard creepy things at their latest location in order to pump up the drama. In this case, the Grave Encounters team — sound recordist Sasha Parker (Ashleigh Gryzko), tech expert Matt White (Juan Riedinger), cameraman T. C. Gibson (Merwin Mondesir), and pseudo-spirit medium Houston Gray (Mackenzie Gray), along with Preston — have committed to spending the night locked inside the long-abandoned Collingwood Psychiatric Hospital, which may or may not be haunted by the ghosts of doctors and patients pasts. Just when it’s looking like there actually might be something supernatural going on, they decide to take off early, but the building is not about to let them all go so easily. Shot in twelve days in a vacant mental facility in Vancouver, Grave Encounters, written, edited, and directed by the Vicious Brothers (Stuart Ortiz and Colin Minihan), presents a promising premise but takes way too long to start delivering the necessary thrills and chills. And when things finally do start happening, they lack any kind of shock or surprise, falling flat when then should have had audiences on the edge of their seats. Evoking such ghost stories as The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity, and The Legend of Hell House, Grave Encounters is filled with potential that never reaches the scare levels of its far more successful predecessors.
After the breakout success of Born to Run in 1975, Bruce Springsteen became embroiled in a lawsuit over control of his music that prevented him from going into the studio to make the highly anticipated follow-up. Springsteen found himself at a crossroads; “You didn’t know if this would be the last record you’d ever make,” he says in the revealing behind-the-scenes documentary The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town. Combining archival footage of the Darkness sessions shot by Barry Rebo with new interviews with all the members of the E Street Band in addition to producers Jimmy Iovine, Jon Landau, and others, editor and director Thom Zimny melds Bruce’s past with the present, delving deep into Springsteen’s complex, infuriating, and fiercely dedicated creative process. “I had to disregard my own mutation,” Springsteen says at one point, regarding his battle to avoid getting caught up in the hype that came with Born to Run, so he decided that his next album would be “a meditation on where are you going to stand.” Rebo captures Springsteen and the E Street Band — from a bare-chested Bruce to a bandanna-less Steve Van Zandt — rehearsing and recording alternate takes of familiar songs as well as tunes that would later wind up on such albums as The River and Tracks, opening up Bruce’s famous notebooks and examining his intense creative process, which included throwing away dozens and dozens of songs that he believed just didn’t fit within his vision of what Darkness should be. Two of the most fascinating parts of the The Promise involve Patti Smith discussing “Because the Night,” which is about her waiting for her boyfriend at the time, Fred “Sonic” Smith, to call her, and Toby Scott talking about mixing the Darkness record to get the sound pictures in Bruce’s head onto vinyl. The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town is screening April 25 at 8:00 at City Winery as a benefit for the American Red Cross, with all proceeds going to Japanese tsunami and earthquake relief; the screening is just one of many being held around the country over the coming week, all of which will include special giveaways.