La Danse: Frederick Wiseman On Point(e)

Frederick Wiseman’s latest documentary, La Danse, features just under three hours of footage of the Paris Opera Ballet, one of the world’s premiere ballet companies. You’ll notice, Dear Reader, that Your Correspondent did not use the words “chronicle,” “document,” or any other synonym that would imply storytelling, because that would be a stretch. (There is, however, plenty of stretching.) But the lack of a narrative is beside the point(e) in the face of such unparalleled dancing, by which even the viewer determined to hate the movie will be captivated, at least for a while, until Wiseman’s hands-off flipbook of dance footage ebbs toward the uniformity of a skateboarding video.

The scope of the film is entirely contained in L’Academie Nationale de Musique, captured in a series of lock-off shots of the Ballet’s workspace—the basement, the underside of the stage with its giant cogs and coils of rope, the plumbing system, the cafeteria, and the industrial machinery of the costume shop. These snapshots of workaday spaces appear throughout the film between rehearsal sessions and performances as if to ground the ballet in a material world. Within the Academie’s walls Wiseman has captured excerpts from performances and exclusive rehearsal sessions that painfully detail the choreographer’s micromanagement of the dancer’s every move, from the slightest muscular tremor to the thoughts in her head. The minutiae of these rehearsals and the mundane chores of putting on a show—vacuuming the theater, dying fabric for costumes, spooning up couscous to hungry ballerinas—are the real-life components of the ballet that the ballet itself works so hard to conceal.

Filmmaking is similar in it’s construction—every shot is carefully considered, everything that makes the final cut has been contemplated—and yet it always strives to mask its own making. But in La Danse, Wiseman seems to highlight its seams. The lens often struggles for focus, the camera readjusts in the middle of takes, the final print is boldly pixilated, and the camera even catches an image of itself in the mirror, complete with the crew’s equipment and a camera operator. This filmmaking style may come off as blasé, but more likely Wiseman is doubling up on his demonstration of an artistic process exposed, focusing for once on the process of achieving excellence rather than the final product.

This is not to say the film was excellent in its own right; the dancing took precedent over anything the filmmaking may have added or omitted, and aside from being an illuminating look at what really goes on behind those velvet curtains, the ballets featured in the film offer something for everyone, ranging from the most classical Tchaikovsky to ultramodern pieces with pop and lock and buckets of blood. Even though the film is stingy with story, ballet itself has never needed narrative to be enjoyed, and La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet is no exception. –Christianne Hedtke