The screen is usually a canvas, but it becomes a window to an enormous room in Wim Wenders’ latest 3D documentary, “From Inside Out – The Architecture of Peter Zumthor.” Within that room unfolds the tale of the Swiss architect of the title, told in occasionally laborious ways. It spends much of its two-hour runtime teaching you how to watch it, and like your average high school class, you might not see the value of its instruction until it eventually comes in handy. In that vein, Wenders presents some magnificent things in the film’s final third, sensations which emerge like Zumthor’s own views on the function of his buildings, which he ties to human experience, understood by its inhabitants gradually, and then all at once — from the inside out.
Beginning with shots of concave corners and convex, monolithic surfaces, “From Inside Out” engenders curiosity before taking academic detours. These come courtesy of Zumthor himself, whom we first meet as a ghostly projection upon sleek, minimalist surfaces, emanating from the 1980s. Like the Holocaust survivors whose poetry populated the walls in Wenders’ “Anselm” — his 3D retrospective on the works of sculptor Anselm Kiefer — Zumthor’s words become inseparable from each room the camera explores, and each building the architect believes ought to feel at one with its surroundings.
We eventually meet Zumthor in the present: an unassuming man in his eighties, whose descriptions of form, function and fluidity often repeat themselves, but whose sincerity and wisdom are hard to shake. As the film explores houses, museums and other Zumthor commissions, the architect’s use of light and natural materials becomes as important as the theoretical people he intends to fill each space — or, in the case of complicated restorations, the people who inhabited them decades ago. Wenders depicts these ghosts of past and future through dramatizations of curious travelers, whose whispering voiceover offers scattered thoughts on where they stand.
There’s a tinge of humor, too, in Zumthor’s stubbornness when designing someone’s home, as the conceptual clashes with the preferential. However, the architect eventually gives way to use and function first, despite valuing the aesthetics at hand (not to mention, his collaborations with local artisans). It isn’t long before Wenders introduces the idea that Zumthor’s spaces are only as important as what goes inside them, when he first contrasts old and contemporary footage of museums he designed, each filled with deeply personal art installations — some of them about war.
Zumthor himself doesn’t have the most interesting personal history — at least, not as far as this film is concerned — so Wenders’ exploration can come off as superficial at first. However, this ends up part and parcel of the structure. It echoes the feeling of approaching a marvelous building from afar, and entering its sterile lobby, before slowly discovering its mischievous secrets.
Although some scenes and enactments can meander, they give way to a moving triptych of projects whose presentation feels, in a way, climactic. One is a home deeply personal to Zumthor. Another is a Nordic installation built in tribute to women killed in witch trials, which feels terrifying to walk through — a kind of infinitude accentuated by Franz Lustig’s 3D cinematography. And the third is arguably Zumthor’s magnum opus: his sprawling, amoebic construction housing the permanent collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, whose planning and completion the doc depicts in detail.
By the time the building is finished (and visited by a number of filmmakers, including Ava DuVernay and Werner Herzog), Wenders’ camera moves in tandem with Zumthor’s own abstract notions of the art pieces needing to feel horizontally equal, with none being granted more or less importance than any other. The sprawling gallery seems to have no beginning or end. Its bends extend endlessly, revealing pockets and side rooms with rough, exposed concrete contrasting the gilded grandeur of the pieces on display.
It takes a while to realize this, or at least to internalize it, but the film’s own architecture is not dissimilar, with what feels like winding segues that add up to an experience of fluid expanse, of great wandering, and ultimately, of soulful appreciation. Certainly, no one is beholden to a film this demanding, but Wenders wields his 3D camera to craft a perfect marriage of subject and form, filling echoing spaces with art and stories much like Zumthor’s architecture does — until eventually, you leave with a new appreciation of the physical world, and your place within it.
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