On Movies: 'Pina' melds dance with 3-D - and her death

Wim Wenders was two weeks away from the start date for his new film when his star - Philippina "Pina" Bausch, the German choreographer - died. She had cancer, and had been diagnosed only five days earlier.

"We had been talking about making this together for almost 20 years," says Wenders, who had finally figured out how to go about doing his documentary - in 3-D - when Bausch died.

"We were so happy that after 20 years of stalling, Pina and I were finally now on."

And then came the news of her death.

"It was the unimaginable, nobody had seen it," Wenders recalls. "Not her friends, not her company. . . . It found us all unprepared, and because the film and the concept for it and the whole desire to make it had been such a mutual thing between us, I canceled the film and pulled the plug and told everybody that it was off. That was it."

But here Pina is, in its second week at the United Artists RiverView and United Artists King of Prussia, a beautiful celebration of movement and grace - and of a driving creative force in the world of dance. Two weeks ago, Pina was nominated for a best documentary feature Academy Award.

"We never would have made the film if it hadn't been for the dancers," Wenders explains, speaking of Bausch's Tanztheater Wuppertal troupe. "They decided to continue the company, they decided to fulfill the contracts and the tours and the performances and selected an artistic director from their midst . . . . And they also started to rehearse the four pieces that Pina had put on the agenda of the company so we could film them.

"They started to actually rehearse what we would have filmed - that's when I realized that maybe it was wrong not to film."

Wenders, whose narrative fiction work includes the great road movie Paris, Texas and the Berlin-set epic fantasy Wings of Desire, has another documentary-feature Oscar nomination on his resume: for his 1999 celebration of Cuban music, The Buena Vista Social Club.

In Pina, he puts his 3-D cameras into the streets, on monorails and motorways, on the barren ridges of slag heaps and the verdant gardens of modernist mansions, following the whimsical, sensual work of Bausch's devoted gang of men and women. Wenders could not be more thrilled with how the stereoscopic technology captured their movements, and how it creates a sense of space and depth that adds to the viewing experience.

"It seemed like dance and 3-D were made for each other," he says. "They bring out the best in each other."