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.
