Thurs-Sun March 6-9 at the Little Theatre.

See Movie Times for schedule or call 686-3243 for info.

We are FIlm's willing suckers, conditioned to fall for its every trick. We understand how the camera creates emotion. We know when we are being manipulated by music. The way a film is shaped does not escape us.

But it takes something like choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's full-length dance film Fase (directed by Thierry De Mey) to refresh our jaded sensibilities. In fact, it takes something like Fase to show us just how jaded those sensibilities have become in the first place.

If you've ever encountered dance on television--ballet presented PBS-style--you remember the wide-angle shot that gives you the whole stage with microscopic dancers, the close-ups that give you no sense of composition or space. You were audience, or you were on stage; a mash of perspectives was pretty much the best they could do.

The whole premise of dance cinema is that choreography for the stage and choreography for film are two different animals--something long accepted in the division (obviously) between theater and movies. Fase began as a stage work; the dance, to music by minimalist American composer Steve Reich, premiered in Brussels in 1982 and is largely thought to be one of the influential European works of the era. The film breaks new ground.

It opens with a long unbroken shot of two women dancing against a blank wall with three shadows behind them (one of each woman, plus a composite of the two shadows that blends and bleeds in an amazing optical riddle). The camera pans and lowers and moves in; the dancers dance on, a series of movements based on straight (but not stiff) arms and pivots around a stationary foot, like a weathervane in variable winds. The long shot has the quality of held breath, as opposed to breathlessness; it is serious rather than joyful.

The details take on magnificent clarity, partly because of the camerawork, partly because De Keersmaeker choreographs around repetition, so that the deviations stand out--and the deviations seem sly and deliberate. One dancer comes out of a spin in an ecstatic smile, rather than the usual moody dance stare. The other, in the course of a pivoting movement, swats at her dress so that it flies up above her waist. (You realize, with guilt, you want it to happen again; part of the reason we enjoy dance--it's not terrible to admit it--is seeing amazing bodies doing things we can't.)

Dance, in part, resists the camera. This is a good thing--two components working against each other to make something new. The camera is mobile, and, as in feature films, confers its own brand of meaning, but in this case it is the application of a narrative quality to an abstract entity--which creates a new kind of tension absent from live dance. Not every shot works (a series of short cuts that rapidly move the dancers closer to the viewer tries too hard) but some are transcendent, as in a long, still moment in which the dancers pause, framed by a window reflecting the headlights and brake lights of passing cars in the dusk. In one of Fase's movements, the dancers are confined to a pair of stools, and you might think that the audience should be as restricted as the dancers--to build the requisite tension, the commitment-- but the camera's freedom makes this more evident, not less.

It seems to me that dance cinema works better when the dance remains abstract and pure, rather than when it is overlaid with narrative, no matter how allusive or elusive (or perhaps illusive). The gritty urban realism/romanticism of Ellie Sandstrom's Ellie (another entry in New Dance Cinema) feels overwrought next to the masterful distance of Fase; the energy and animated effects of Space-In (in which a group of colorfully dressed dancers draw chalk lines on the sidewalk and then dance on them) reminded me a little too much of Sesame Street. This is not to say that dance is always best served cold: The last movement of Fase--two dancers doing a modern jig through a pillared loft to the sound of clapping hands--resolves in a moment of neat, abrupt joy. I won't spoil it--see for yourself.