Crazy Horse (2011) returns to Paris and its legendary cabaret, operating continuously since 1951. Once again, Wiseman exposes the stark divide between backstage logistics and onstage enchantment, though here the dynamic feels even more alienating. As choreographer Philippe Decouflé observes while staging his show Désirs, the venue trades on its reputation as the “meilleur spectacle de danse nue chic au monde” (“the best chic nude dance show in the world”). Yet behind the curtain, the organisation feels surprisingly loose, as no one seems entirely sure who is responsible for what. Beside Decouflé stands artistic director Ali Mahdavi, whose obsessive focus on silhouette and illusion reveals how methodically seduction is manufactured. Equally crucial is Roselyne Diouy, the venue’s head couturière, whom Wiseman captures in a lengthy, almost existential conversation with a dancer over how a skirt fits around her bottom.

In the studio, unlike the extended rehearsals of Ballet, the dancers seem to pick up the choreography with ease. Everything carries a lighter touch, though it is no less driven by perfectionism and demands an equally formidable inner strength. Classical ballet is treated with irony and irreverence: the performers burst out laughing while watching a video of ballet bloopers, before conceding that “c’est très dur.” Later, the iconic Pas de quatre from Swan Lake is subverted by a male tap-dancing duo.

The film reaches a climax during the auditions. Directives such as “Stick your bum out” reduce the candidates to a precise physical geometry. Wiseman intensifies this sense of erasure throughout the film by repeatedly cropping the dancers’ faces out of the frame and focusing his lens on buttocks, legs and hyper-arched backs. It is alienating to watch such extraordinary discipline, precision and dedication devoted to assembling a standardised, commercialised form of desire.

We see the dancers only insofar as they are Crazy Horse workers, confined to a claustrophobic, windowless space and living in semi-obscurity throughout painfully fleeting careers, bound to the brief freshness of youth. Wiseman never passes judgement, yet he systematically strips away the venue’s magic, leaving the viewer to wonder what truly remains. In the end, a sequence of hand-formed shadow puppets, in which a kissing couple dissolves into a flying dove, seems to remind us that real seduction tastes like love or freedom.

With no voiceover, non-diegetic music or interviews, Wiseman maintains an almost invisible presence. No one seems affected by the camera. Here, as in his other documentaries, he captures a shared existential condition: the subsumption of individual identity into a demanding machine. In dance, the body remains the ultimate canvas upon which power and discipline are inscribed, while the idea of the body as an archive forms one of the adagios running through this Biennale edition. Wiseman’s cinema remains an enduring invitation to look beneath the surface and uncover the extraordinary weight of the unnoticed.