Not often I will watch a two hour forty minute french documentary about ballet. No narration, no interviews, just observation of constant critiquing, perfecting in rinse and repeat rehearsals. The whole Paris opera is captured in every aspect and by the end, the performances are mesmerizing for many reasons. Can feel daunting as at times, it feels like you've been sitting in the same spot for a week. It works for the better and for someone like me completely ignorant of ballet it was wondrous.

Ethnographic, with gaze as an invisible thinking man, who will sit quietly and contemplate until the next rehearsal, or scour the bowels for a seamstress or chef. Lots of contemporary; intimate duets, with the rigor and control of classical. Very little 'stuffy', dress ballet performance, providing context: individual, familial, rather than pretty toys, years in their winding. Scarcity makes it fleeting, special--a dazzling pendant. Rehearsals like red-line Da Vinci drawings. 3 years too short.

a tough watch

One of two great 2009 films about rehearsal, but more than anything about the Paris Opera Ballet as an institution that is artistic, economic, bureaucratic, and political. For all that, never forgets that all this revolves around dance and dancers, and it shows the viewer a very great deal of superb dance and choreography. The dancers themselves are not really shown other than at work, whereas the choreographers and administrators are exposed more revealingly and interestingly. My first Wiseman.

"Wiseman is principally concerned with process here, the process of art's creation and, to a lesser degree, the process of an institution's functioning." - Andrew Schenker

2 and half hours!!! Wiseman should have been more critical in selecting his material. As it is, the film really shows the profound beauty of ballet, but the length and ambition of showing ballet - from the rehearsal to the boardroom to the stage - without an introduction, without any causality - makes it a bit difficult to endure. Still, it's such a beautiful film, that should make everyone who watch it, give up dancing to rhythmical music ever again.