Providing some orientation for the disorienting work of the Dutch printmaker M.C. Escher (1898-1972), the documentary “M.C. Escher: Journey to Infinity” takes its cues from Escher’s writings, which it uses as narration. (Stephen Fry’s voice-over applies an unwarranted grandiosity to these self-effacing musings.)

Escher is quoted as saying that he often dreamed of making a film, although he adds, “I would most certainly bore people to death with it.” Whether anyone else, including Escher, would have done a more engaging job is debatable, but this movie, directed by Robin Lutz, offers an only intermittently satisfying look at his interests and methods. Don’t call it art; Escher felt his output hovered between art and mathematics.

The film is strongest when it uses animation to illustrate Escher’s ideas, as when it unbends the curves of a lithograph to more clearly show what it depicts: a man in a gallery looking at a picture of the very scene he is in, a perspective repeated endlessly. We learn how Escher applied ideas from the mosaics at the Alhambra in Spain to imagery from the natural world. He describes the associative thinking — his mind jumping from a hexagon to a honeycomb to a bee — that inspired his subject matter and says he feels a kinship to Bach’s use of repetition and variation.

Present-day footage of the sites discussed and interviews with Escher’s sons are more perfunctory, as is the commentary from the admiring folk rocker Graham Nash. Escher apparently did not understand why his “cerebral and rationalized” work found favor with the freewheeling 1960s counterculture — which was, in its own blissed-out way, also concerned with infinity.

M.C. Escher: Journey to Infinity
Not rated. In English, Dutch, Italian and German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 21 minutes. In theaters and on virtual cinemas. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters.