Teshigahara: Antoni Gaudí (1984)

Antoni Gaudí is more of a tone poem than a documentary, a perfect fusion of cinema, music and architecture in which Hiroshi Teshigahara takes us on a tour of the architect’s most famed structures. With the exception of a very brief interlude, there’s no dialogue or exposition. Nor is there any information about Gaudí’s biography or personality. Instead, Teshigahara treats Gaudí’s body of a work as a sacred space, approaching it with the hushed, devotional awe that you might bring to a cathedral. Combined with a peculiarly Japanese reverence for architectural minutiae and meditation, that reders the distinctive ambience and eerie playfulness of Gaudí’s buildings powerfully present, along with the way in which they evolved and transformed over time. Gaudí’s movement from neo-Gothic to naturalism has been well documented and analysed, and that’s certainly evident here, but it often feels as if Teshigahara is seeking out a different kind of development and transfiguration – you can feel Gaudí’s faith strengthening with each new structure, culminating with the monumental Sagrada Familia, which he commenced with a twenty-day fast. That transcendent tone is all the more remarkable in that Teshigahara is careful to continually ground Gaudí’s vision in Catalan culture, and the city of Barcelona in particular. From the very beginning, we’re periodically presented with interludes depicting Catalan artefacts, traditions and ceremonies, as if to suggest that Gaudí’s edifices rose out of the same gestures and postures. Perhaps that’s why his buildings feel so liquid and organic – the film opens with one of his fountains, while Teshigahara draws on his own background in ikebana, or traditional flower arrangement, to blur any distinction between the buildings and the gardens that they generally couch or imitate. In addition, Teshigahara reserves the most evanscent, curvaceous segments of Gaudí’s exteriors – and his trademark catenary curves in particular – for his most static shots, giving the impression that these buildings have simply absorbed the rhythmic undulations of his camera; at moments, it is like witnessing a tracking-shot corporealised into something you can inhabit, with all the mysticism and majesty that entails. It’s perhaps surprising, then, that Teshigahara spends so little time on the Sagrada – but then again, it feels a little less distinctive in his particular vision, which makes all Gaudi’s buildings feel tantalisingly unfinished, liquid, open to new vistas and vanishing points.