Watching La danse, I kept thinking of death. My death. It seemed weird. Perhaps, I thought at first, perhaps it is Wiseman. Eighty-years-young this coming January, Frederick Wiseman is simply the greatest, most important filmmaker working in the United States, and he is not long for this world. He was one of the first filmmakers to perfectly hone the observational mode of direct cinema made famous in the U.S. by the Maysles Brothers and D. A. Pennebaker, but more than anything else a form perfected in Quebec by Michel Brault. As a Canadian, I cherish the documentary tradition on which my national cinema is founded. It is the only national cinema in the world whose two greatest filmmakers, Michel Brault and Allan King, are primarily known for documentaries. Wiseman is alone in the U.S. as their equal. He has been making films that immerse the viewer in the workings of institutions without talking heads, direct address, intertitles, chronology – any cinematographic tools that would serve to foreground any functional agency of the artist’s – since making 1967’s Titicult Follies, one of the greatest and most heartbreaking documentaries ever produced. His films are exhaustive fly-on-the-wall dioramas of institutional life: mental institutions like in Titicut, high schools, police departments, welfare offices, zoos, hospitals, women’s shelters, meat packing plants, Wiseman has done them all. La danse is his second film focusing on a ballet company, after 1995s Ballet, about the American Ballet Theater, and it is as beautiful and purely cinematic a film as I have ever seen. I think that a dance company is the absolute perfect subject for Wiseman, allowing him to focus on the institution, how it runs, what kind of market forces converge upon and underpin it, as well as upon dance itself: perhaps the one artform that the cinema elevates more completely, by virtue of the proximity it can attain, than any other. Filmmakers from Powell and Pressburger to Norman McLaren to Robert Altman have done some of their best work w/ ballet as their subject. The film begins w/ quickly intercut establishing shots of Paris followed by similar shots of the world beneath the studio: corridors, pipes, tunnels, the striated networks and subterranean structures that underlay the studio. Photographer John Davey uses the square box of the old Academy ratio (1.33:1) to emphasize the hard and soft lines of these busy connective tissues, these arteries and tessellations. The art of dance is not just thrown into contrast w/ the bureaucracy and consumer capitalist machinations that it requires in order to exist at all, but the smoothed, infinitely opened out spaces where the dancing is done – both the mirror-walled rehearsal spaces that reflect infinitely redoubled illusory reflections outward, and the actual stages w/ their purplish-blue spotlights terminating at a black horizon – suggest plateaus that all this underrigging supports in the same way money, human labor, and the Lehman Brothers support it. The bodies of these incredible young people, boys and girls (like w/ most great films, I was steadfastly bisexual for the duration), are framed in such a way that we almost never see them reflected in the mirrors when they are rehearsing. They are singular and they command the attention of our entire sensory-motor apparatus. The brain and nervous system dance w/ them the same way someone richly involved in a sporting event will jerk about an enacting of the direction he wants a player to go. In a way that is somewhat similar to kung fu movies, dancers remind us of Spinoza’s supposition that we are not yet aware of what a body is capable. Dancers are masochist, practicing a kind of bondage. What they do to their bodies to transcend what is thought of as the body, its utilitarian implementation, is staggering, and to see what they do, these beautiful, tormented bodies, atop these opened-out planes, is to witness something as primordial and elemental as the flickering of a flame. Dance is a Heracletean drug. The process of hypnotizing ourselves watching these dancers is similar to the effect produced by the pulsing, silently musical, morphological handpainted films of structuralists like McLaren and Stan Brakhage w/ the added component of these sexually charged bodies, commingling bodies, bodies that will grow old and die. Dance, like everything else (only more so), is about fucking and dying. Wiseman’s film is a fetishization of death-drive opened up onto a plateau built up from a microcosmic superstructure of institutional scaffolding. Much of the dance work shown in the latter sections of the film invokes Alfred Jarry, the occult, Magick. One woman dancer smears two children w/ stage blood, slams buckets violently over their heads, then lays them at the stage. These beautiful, young bodies writhing in death-lust. There is no power anywhere like this power. And then suddenly we are watching janitors cleaning out an empty, cavernous theater, and again the specter of death and depopulation. It's ineluctable. La danse is easily the film of the year and, after Allan King’s Dying at Grace, the second best documentary I have seen this decade.
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