Antonio Gaudí

Although it might seem odd that idiosyncratic Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara (1927-2001) would make a film about equally idiosyncratic Catalan architect Gaudí (1852-1926), Teshigahara was a formally trained artist himself (whose father was an acknowledged master of the art of ikebana or floral arrangement). During a 1959 trip with his father to Barcelona, the director first encountered the work of Gaudí, whose strangely contorted modernist style, patterned after natural phenomena (particularly the complex structure of trees), had been dismissed by mainstream architectural experts but would be later enthusiastically rediscovered (especially in Japan) in the 1960s. Teshigahara returned to Spain in 1984 to make this largely wordless documentary celebration of Gaudí's creations, during which the camera tours Barcelona, lovingly capturing the exterior curves and spirals (as well as the equally striking interiors) of his spectacular architecture—from private homes to the unfinished masterpiece of the Sagrada Familia Cathedral—backed by a haunting synthesizer-and-glass-harmonica score. Given the dearth of commentary, Antonio Gaudí isn't so much a conventional documentary as a visual poem, one that has a hypnotic effect on the viewer. Criterion, which earlier released a boxed set of the director's fiction features (Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara, reviewed in VL Online-10/07), once again has done an impressive job, offering a superb restored digital transfer, together with a second disc of bonus features, including a 1959 short featuring Teshigahara's original footage of Gaudí's buildings in Barcelona, an interview with architect Arata Isozaki (also Teshigahara's art director), two TV documentaries on the architect (one directed by British filmmaker Ken Russell), a short film by Teshigahara on his father's sculptures, and a lavishly illustrated 36-page booklet. Highly recommended. Aud: C, P. (F. Swietek)