Cathedrals of Culture

Six international directors have teamed up for a very special 3D project. In Cathedrals of Culture, each of them portrays a very special building: Wim Wenders takes us through the Berlin Philharmonie, Austrian Michael Glawogger (Whores` Glory) through the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg, Dane Michael Madsen visits Halden Prison in Norway, and Robert Redford introduces the Salk Institute on the coast of California. The award-winning Norwegian filmmaker Margreth Olin shows the opera house in Oslo from its particularly fascinating side and Karim Aïnouz finally dedicates his contribution to the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Each of the directors lends his episode his very own signature. The basic idea, of course, always remains the same: to bring the buildings to life. They should tell their own story to the viewer and open up perspectives that would otherwise be denied to the viewer. And the makers of this ambitious project have succeeded in doing just that. The 3D tracking shots through the architecturally, historically or socially exciting buildings are sometimes really spectacular and highly fascinating.

However, it must be said that the quality of the individual contributions varies significantly. Sometimes it's the background music, which is very tiring and distracting. Then it is the decision to let the building speak in the first person, which takes some getting used to. Time and again at moments like this, there's a feeling that the images here would have been quite enough to speak for themselves, or that a slightly more neutral off-camera commentary would have been much more conducive to the whole thing. Certainly, Wenders, Redford and company didn't want to stage a conventional documentary here. They wanted to leave the purely fact-based narrative perspective behind and create a completely new view of and into the selected buildings and complexes. But at moments the filmmakers here simply get in the way of the desired effect with their artistic ambitions.

That doesn't really seem too serious when the six episodes are viewed individually. As a nearly three-hour film, however, the viewer's nervous system is strained quite a bit. The fantastic pictures can only counteract that to a limited extent. Cathedrals of Culture is an exciting, fascinating and worth seeing project, there is no question about that. But as a complete work, the whole thing is also a bit tough and exhausting, which is why this cinema version can only be recommended to viewers who are equally interested in visually stunning, but also somewhat unwieldy program cinema fare and architecture. But then the following also applies without reservation: Worth seeing!

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp