Blueprint for Genius |Antonio Gaudi will only increase your admiration for the singular Spanish architect and his amazing creations.
Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1984 contemplation of the work of the Catalan architect Antonio Gaudí (1852-1926) and its distinctive geo-cultural surroundings isn’t exactly what you would call “instructive” or “fact-filled.” I had to look up the years of Gaudí’s birth and death on the web, for instance.
But Teshigahara, whom Metro fans might remember from a recent-ish mini-retrospective that included The Woman in the Dunes, The Face of Another, and Pitfall, makes a good point with his steady-roving curiosity about the extraordinary structures and environments Gaudí devised—the otherworldly yet strangely organic vision the architect brought to every detail of his work is endlessly arresting to gaze upon, no matter how little you know about the man.
What Teshigahara clearly shows is that Gaudí was a man who had some kind of extrasensory rapport with the world around him, translating the shapes of nature and the Catalonian countryside into bricks, mortar, tile, stone, and wood. Certainly no amount of narration could add anything to the experience of looking at Gaudí’s work—his fluid, loopy use of such intractable materials is almost unhinging.
An apartment block in Barcelona that looks like it could have either sprung, fungus-like, from the ground or dripped like precipitate from the grey sky, its tangles of wrought iron filigree frozen in the wind; the ceiling of a long outdoor promenade, propped up by brink palm trunks and webbed with a woozy canopy of stone fronds; delirious hallucinations of tile mosaic describing the psychedelic perimeter of a public plaza within sight of Gaudí’s crowning (and as yet incomplete) achievement, the Sagrada Familia. After a while, the rippling ceilings, asymmetrical towers toned like a beast’s haunch, melting windowframes and seashell-whorl stairwells, the disconcerting suppleness of Gaudí’s creations floating before the eyes, paired with Toru Takemitsu’s eerie soundscape, become hypnotic, if not exactly soothing.
The patience with which Teshigahara explores built landscapes is matched by his genius for finding the mundane precursors to Gaudí’s work—the slippery litheness of fish on ice at a market, the footworn spill of a narrow cobbled street through a Catalan village, eroded stone cliffs bearded with thick thatches of green—and his preoccupation with the graceful, effortless arcs of nature that makes his work so startling.
The last 15 minutes of Antonio Gaudí, where Teshigahara breaks the unnarrated, nearly wordless course of the film to give viewers a little context, is devoted to exploring the Sagrada Familia, a vast, almost frighteningly strange cathedral that Gaudí devoted the last years of his life to building and which might even be completed in time for the centenary of his death. An unidentified elderly gent talks about being involved in taking over the construction of the cathedral after Gaudí’s death and how the Spanish Civil War hobbled its progress. Meanwhile, the camera discovers countless wonders in the profusion of billowing masonry, fleshy apertures, and spooky Catholic iconography.
So if you do your homework ahead of time, you’ll be all set to appreciate the historical and artistic significance of Antonio Gaudí. The unstudious shouldn’t be put off, however—there’s no shortage of pleasure to be had in the mild disorientation that results from just wandering and having your attention directed by a celebrated Japanese director around the fabulous worlds conjured by the man known as “God’s architect.” (I got that last bit off the Internet as well.)
