If I had spent three months in Boise filming legislators talking about public utilities policy, spending time with the Paris ballet would sound pretty inviting to me too. La Danse - Le Ballet de l'Opéra de Paris is Wiseman’s second Ballet movie, but of course we already know that, as we also know it’s his second about a famed French artistic institution. That one was founded in 1680, when this one was already eleven years old, though you have to Google all that, because these are films that aren’t heavy on the dates and names. And to call this one a documentary is just too small, it’s a beautiful work of art in its own right, and in no way either a sequel or a repeat of his first ballet film, but it is of course a Wiseman film, characteristic in many ways and with more than a few surprises.
I’ll admit my borderline ignorance of ballet. I’ve seen dance performances maybe ten times (American Ballet Theatre and Paul Taylor Dance Company mainly) and like any serious cinema person I know Michael Powell’s Red Shoes very well (and his Tales of Hoffman is no slouch in the dance department either). Wim Wender’s 3D film Pina (really good and important too for its imaginative uses of 3D) has a tiny overlap with this film, in that Pina Bausch was the choreographer of one of the ballet pieces we see part of here, along with works by six other choreographers. But I’m mentioning this just to say I’m not pretending that I actually know what I’m talking about here when I discuss dance, but maybe being pretty stupid about the subject will help me to appreciate some of the abundant cinematic qualities of this rich work that’s full of ways worth appreciating and thinking about.
The 1995 Ballet had a pretty divided structure, in that performances before an audience didn’t take place until the group hit the road, leaving New York and on to Athens and Copenhagen. The first half was all rehearsals and exercises, and when they did travel to perform, Wiseman found lots of local interest when we weren’t on stage - night clubs and beaches in Greece and Tivoli Gardens in Denmark, so it wasn’t like we stuck to the stage in that second half. Anyway, you can click back for more on that one if you want. There are some interesting differences here. For one, while we do get substantial pieces from seven ballets, we never once see an audience member in a theater seat or hear any applause whatever. The closest we get is an audience entering the theater lobby about two hours in to the two and half hour movie, but we don’t get an actual audience to any of the dances then or at any other point. We do see those dances on a stage, but the backdrop is always dark, and I think the dances have been performed strictly for the film-maker. Also markedly different from Ballet is not having a division between a rehearsal part of the movie and then a performance part. Here, we see dances at all stages, and the order is Wiseman’s, not a progression of a single work from rehearsal to performance and then on to the next, or a sense that efforts of the company are leading up to an opening night. It’s likely due to the high quality of the dancing we see throughout that rehearsals, exercises, and classes can sit comfortably intercut with finished pieces. Almost to the end, rehearsals with choreographers keep appearing, and rather than our being confused by this, it all seems to make sense. The point of the place isn’t just to turn out product for audience consumption, it’s to keep seeing the art being learned, rehearsed, performed, and then back for more of all three.
Part of my dance ignorance is not knowing the best things to call the teachers, of which we see many. They are often the choreographers, but the Ballet is also a school, so some are indeed teachers, and then there are the so-called Ballet Masters, so when we see a dancer with someone giving them instruction, it’s hard to know what their exact role and title is. What’s evident is that we see choreographers of markedly different styles, and together with the varied configurations of dancers - sometimes a solo ballerina, often a man and a woman, and many other times larger groups of dancers - we’re exposed to a continually engrossing and varied set of dance situations. We see the dancers complimented many times, sometimes criticized, and always coached along to do better. La Danse is a teaching film as much as Wiseman’s films set in schools, in fact, that leads me to something I realized while watching this film, which I think is fairly important.
The division between Wiseman’s culture films and his institutional films is pretty thin. The only difference might be that his films about dance and theater will give substantial examples of the works being produced, but along the way, most of what we see is pretty similar to activities in many of his other non-culture films. One way to see La Danse is as a combination of Basic Training and High School. Even though ballet might seem far from the military, among Wiseman’s big insights about the world is that training, teaching, learning, whether it’s in the military, the arts, medicine, religion, or any other institution has lots of commonality. The ones already doing it will show the younger ones what they think is important. Even the director of the Paris Opera Ballet speaks of a hierarchy within her organization, and Wiseman is always really interested in that sort of stuff - it’s not just in movies with generals and captains and sergeants, though we’ve got a good number of those too. We can get real basic, as I think I’ve already said, and say that he’s interested in how people interact with each other within communities, which isn’t as simplistic as it sounds, partly because his sense of communities and institutions is so varied, as obviously we’ve been seeing. That a monastery, army maneuvers, a department store, a zoo, and a ballet company, just to pick a quick five, can all be sites to examine similar human interactions is a remarkable feat. We’ll see the processes that define the institution, the way they successfully deal with those they work with, the new kids and how they’re handled, the ones who thrive and the ones who don’t measure up, the values and interests and idiosyncrasies that are displayed along the way. I think it’s also emerging (well, we’re thirty-five films in now) that Wiseman has a big interest in people at various stages of their lives - especially early training and aging (all the way to death). La Danse has scenes where the young are advised, and the Director speaks of a funeral for a colleague she just attended but needed to leave in order to get back to her dancers, and she reminds us a number of times about the generations of dancers she’s concerned with, from starting out to retirement. Actually, we’ve probably seen enough scenes of retirements in these movies that they could be edited into a full-length movie of their own. (I’d bet by now there have even been as many retirements as sermons.) The point is just that one of the processes that Wiseman clearly looks at, especially when you take all of his work together, is life itself, and we might even add heavy doses of animal life in there with us other primates.
I guess that might count as a tangent, so let’s get back to La Danse and some of its more specific glories. One is the radically simple way dances are shown, almost entirely in long takes and with whole groups and whole bodies always visible. Movies with dance are usually big on close-ups - let’s see those pointed toes, fluid gestures, dramatic facial expressions. Wiseman went this different way in his first ballet film too, but here it really becomes an artistic credo. The camera may move to follow a group and the angle on the dancers is well chosen, often angled down a bit from above, but consistent with Wiseman’s general outlook, we see groups interacting and even when there is a single dancer, we’re likely to see a teacher observing and coaching them. The camera position is never close to what we’d think of as that of an audience member or of the proscenium arch. No static invisible recording, ever. Instead, we’re in a Wiseman position, observing closely but taking in the whole scene, moving when the action moves. A nice challenge of this approach, even more so than in Ballet, is in rehearsal rooms, which here seem to have even more walls of mirrors than those New York spaces. It suits Wiseman though to be angled in a corner, which here means you won’t catch him on camera unless it’s absolutely necessary, and even then for maybe a second or two. (Hardly a Hitchcock cameo, and the only time point I’ll offer, but take a look at about 20:52 if you want to.) We should also note that this is the first Wiseman film in the more rectangular 16:9 screen ration more common in current televisions.). It’s also revealing to watch dance a number of times without music, and even to hear bare feet and shoes making sounds along the floor because a microphone (presumably controlled by Wiseman) is close enough to record it. This is ballet of great intimacy, or we might say, of directness. As beautiful as these dance scenes are, and they really are, they are still consistent with the style of direct observation.
A difference between American and French ballet, if these two films are any indication, is that the French place a far greater emphasis upon dramatic and narrative aspects of dance. There is much more talk here of what a character is thinking or what their motivation is, closer to Comédie-Française than American Ballet Theatre, and the choreographers can sound as much like theater or film directors talking to actors. As befits a stereotype, perhaps, the French approach is more analytical. (It should be said though too that there is much more of an international presence here, and we’re perhaps playfully tricked in the first couple of brief scenes to hear only English.) I’ll mention one exchange between a choreographer and a ballerina, in an on-stage rehearsal, but this is really just one among many in the film. They’re working on his piece Le songe de Médée, based upon the Greek tragedy. He says to her, describing her dance: "You talk to him. Your movements say: 'You're back. I'll look after you. heal you.' But you are still Medea. There are strange little signs or ambiguous gestures . . . It's like in the X-Men stories. They want to be in love, but they have dangerous gifts, so they can’t.” She says “Edward Scissorhands,” and he replies “Exactly!” Remember that this is a wordless dance they’re talking about. We never saw anything like this with the Americans in the first Ballet film, where the interest seemed entirely focused on movements and rhythms, and hardly on reference points or deep thought. There’s nothing wrong with how the Americans do it. It’s just very different from what we see here, especially this strong concern with dramatic meaning as integral to dance.
Engrossing in the film as well, as it was in Ballet, is the range of styles of the teachers, in everything from the levels of control they exert while supervising a rehearsal to the nature of their responses to what they see. Some of them dance every movement themselves, attempting with their sometimes older bodies to give enough of an idea so that their younger supple students can take up what they’re passing on. Other teachers sit on the sidelines, perhaps calling out a few words of encouragement or criticism. If they have one thing in common, it’s the desire to keep repeating. Words to the effect of “That was really good, let’s start again at the beginning” are heard quite often. The very first scene in French, a beautiful run-through of about twenty-five ballerinas, letting you know right off we’re in the big leagues here. The quality of the dancing is already quite incredible when the ballet master says “Pas mal du tout”, and even she seems to realize that’s an understatement. Still, she says “Back to the beginning” and in the first of many excellent End of Scene lines, says “Not bad for a first try.” If the incredible level of dancing we see right at the start is a first try, we’re in for some great stuff, as indeed we are. There are reasons this Company has been around for 350 years or so.
La Danse also demonstrates well a refining of Wiseman’s talents. One of the ways that’s evident is in the many really short episodes we get - the ones ranging from maybe thirty seconds to no more than a couple of minutes. Of course there are the meetings and the transitional exterior shots and costume shops that we’d likely expect, but to me more wow-inducing are the little miniatures that Wiseman can toss off so brilliantly, and many of them wordlessly. A couple of great ones are first a quick trip to the roof, where there’s a beekeeper tending to a bunch of square boxes filled with his charges. In about a nice minute and a half, we get a neat stepping through his process of harvesting honey - this true to the sense in these films that however devoted to their principal concerns they are (and boy are they), if Wiseman sees something interesting, he’s going to look at it closely and make a sequence of it. He explores the ballet company’s forever home, the Palais Garnier, literally from top to bottom. Way down there is water with fish in it and centuries old catacombs, and way up there is the famed Chagall ceiling, better photographed here than I’ve ever seen. And attention must be paid to the best cleaning sequence so far, starting with sweeping up old programs on the exquisite marble staircases leading to the theater, and then our only view of all the seats, as a worker goes down rows picking up things under them, then moving to the wings and returning with a backpack vacuum cleaner to keep at the job. It’s another one-minute compressed documentation of a process - too thought out and thorough to be considered just a quick glimpse. When Wiseman looks at something and then includes it, the feeling is never of randomness, not like snapshots, but more like mini-essays. Just a last one of these tour de force moments: filmed entirely in a mirror, a dancer holding a prop dagger practices walking on her toes entirely without music. It’s only about thirty seconds and it’s hypnotic, a moment of dedicated hard work that’s beautiful to behold. Wiseman probably had an hour of footage of this, but there’s so many varieties of artistry on display that length, short or long, is not for the viewer the most important consideration. Maybe this time the structure is not so much mosaic as kaleidoscopic. It’s a dazzling film.