Enlarge image (© www.pina-film.de) In the modern dance world, it seems there are few things that Pina Bausch did not do for the art form. Her legacy as an artist able to appeal to human sensibility and transcend the boundaries of conventional dance drew her an audience from across generations and disciplines. German filmmaker Wim Wenders, himself an artist of formidable scope with an acute understanding of what moves us as human beings, counts himself among those bound by the common experience of her Tanztheater Wuppertal's performances and the emotionally evocative character of her work.

"I was in awe of her," he began, standing before the post-screening audience on January 4 at IFC Center in New York, still clutching their 3-D glasses and reeling from the feature-length tour of Bausch's creative genius. This was not the first time Wenders had given a talk on Pina Bausch; nor was it the first Q&A in the city, having introduced his new documentary, "Pina," at its premiere at the 2011 New York Film Festival in October. Now it stands to win an Oscar as Germany's entry for Best Foreign Film. Aware of the questions to come- and eager to impart his knowledge of Bausch's art, gathered over his 25-year friendship with the choreographer- he launched into the depths of his fascination with her dance theater, grasping it at its root.

"[Pina] had an uncanny ability to observe. She sharpened one of her senses more than you can imagine: how you can express yourself with your body," said Wenders. He spoke from first-hand experience: upon seeing his first Bausch piece, "Café Müller," he was brought to tears within the first few minutes. "I didn't know what hit me," he said. "But my body did."

"Café Müller" is one of the landmark Tanztheater Wuppertal performances featured in the film, which poses also as a kind of archive of her work by capturing the raw emotional pull of Bausch's pieces in 3-D. The striking choreography of "Le Sacre du Printemps" comes to life in this format, as the dancers advance grotesquely down the soil-covered stage in sharp and rapid gesticulations, past the limit of the movie screen. The scenes from her more recent "Full Moon," performed in New York at the 2010 BAM Next Wave Festival after Bausch's death, likewise reach new visual heights, capturing the full presence of the giant moonlit boulder standing in the middle of a rain-soaked stage, as well as the all-consuming physicality of the dancers' movement.

There are, appropriately, few words in "Pina," besides the brief thoughtful utterances by her dancers recalling a moment with Pina or her influence on their craft. For the series of choreographic scenes set both on stage and on-site in the German town of Wuppertal and its surroundings, there are no introductions, no titles. Enlarge image (© www.pina-film.de) Wenders knows to allow the choreography and its dancers to speak directly to the viewer-and not to place words in the way. "She didn't say much, and neither did I. She just smiled at me," he recalled of his interactions with Bausch.  But she had a "vocabulary and grammar of body language,” explained Wenders, a realization Bausch herself reflects upon in one of her rare appearances in the film, taken from an old interview. "It's really a language," she says. "You can read it."

The film was never intended to be a tribute to Pina Bausch, but was rather the culmination of a project 20 years in the making. While the two always wanted to capture her works- which, said Wenders, she felt were never preserved in their true form in any recordings - they seemed nearly impossible to film, until Wenders realized the potential of 3-D for dance. Two days before the start of shooting, Pina Bausch suddenly died.

Wenders, about to abandon the project in the wake of her death, was encouraged to create a film by the dancers of Tanztheater Wuppertal, which became a way for both Wenders and the company to come to terms with the loss. But the film does not maintain an air of sadness or mourning. Instead, said Wenders, he adopted Bausch's own working methods to string the film together. When embarking on a new work, Bausch would develop the core idea, and then pose pointed questions to her dancers, who were only permitted to respond with movement. Bausch then built her choreography and molded it into a cohesive piece. In this way, the material was not "choreography" in the sense that it was "not imposed upon the dancers," said Wenders. "It was from them."

Enlarge image (© www.pina-film.de) Wenders decided to do the same: he composed questions for the dancers, filming their responses. "Pina," is in Wenders' words, then, a film of "answers." For which, naturally, there are no words.