Antonio Gaudi
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List Price: $29.99
Features
• Color
• NTSC
In Theaters : 05 March, 1986
DVD Release : 28 December, 1999 |
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Antonio Gaudi description
Creator of one of the most bizarre and organic styles in the history of architecture, Antonio Gaudi Cornet, Spain's national treasure, was blessed with not only the vision, but the patronage that allowed him to build his elaborate and surreal designs. With Antonio Gaudi, Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara (Woman in the Dunes) gives a tour of the makings of Gaudi's world. Almost entirely without narration, Teshigahara guides us instead with an eerie score by Toru Takemitsu and a few subtitles. The film is more a poem than a documentary, but don't expect an approach similar to Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi. Instead we are given a quiet soundtrack that mixes Takemitsu's sparse score with the natural sounds surrounding Gaudi's structures, and a stationary camera presents the buildings as if they have sprouted: supports seem to magically erupt from the ground like roots, and our eyes are led through the textures and patterns of Gaudi's elaborate mosaic stone and brick designs. Visually revealing and comprehensive, Teshigahara leaves us with only one thing to do--to view Gaudi's amazing world with our own eyes. --Ted Sonnenschein |
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Antonio Gaudi Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥
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An Antti Keisala Comment: The Book of Nature
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Oh my, what expectations I had regarding this film: Teshigahara has impressed me as much as one just can, his Woman in the Dunes' (Suna no onna, 1984) ranking as one of the all-time greats in my books. He is a towering figure in cinema, and to think that it was only one of his ventures (you might know that he dedicated most of his life, as had his family before him, to a very special kind of japanese flower-arranging, ikeban). Architecture, apparently, was another.
I don't claim any qualification in the field of architecture, but as someone who cherishes space and those who directly refer to it (or its absence) in cinematic worlds, GaudA can't be far behind. The buildings are so vividly spatial they not only interact with the surrounding space, the interiors themselves are in a word divine.
You might be a dreamer, much in the same vein as I am. Then you might have had infatuations, be it for real persons or places or simple images, moods that pass through you, triggered by certain moments and feelings. Perhaps you might have had an infatuation for a girl, someone you know by only a limited context; much in the same way passing by in the street as the girl in Rohmer's The Bakery Girl of Monceau', you don't know her, and you only cherish the impression of her, wishing to know her, filling the void left by the lack of knowledge with your own ideals and fantasy. That is, you half invent a person. Then, in a sudden, you get the chance to meet her. And you might feel terrified, knowing that you would be faced with reality that is outside of your own imagination, not within the fantasies and archetypes of your mind. I know would be. And I know I would take the risk of being disappointed, because that is how our heart works most of the time.
I was pretty much in this same situation with this film. As I've noted, Teshigahara is to me an important abstractionist on a very personal level, and GaudA is even more so. So there I was, like a young boy, afraid to meet the possible love of my life, merely because I knew that there was the distinct possibility of not falling in love.
So did I?
Now, forget about the rather horrifying transfer available (or unavailable, depending on which format you're looking for) and set your eyes upon the film itself, no matter how much the quality of the transfer tries to distract you from what's going on. The film is both gorgeous and disappointing. It is gorgeous in how Teshigahara defines space, perhaps the most beautiful space ever known to man. He doesn't simply stick to the postcard images of exteriors, which by themselves alone are breathtakingly vivacious in how they interact with their surroundings, but he takes the camera, our eye, inside and that is where the real magic lies, as well as the only disappointing thing I can find from the film.
Teshigahara doesn't move the camera much, which in itself is appropriate in places, but also misses in my mind the greatest cinematic adventures in space possible: we move scarcely inside the buildings, only note the astonishing plunges into space by the structures, the walls, the strange shapes. He does take us on a ride like this occasionally, for an example when entering a building through the main entrance doors. This is so close to a Tarkovskian eye, a meditative, languorous eye that swims in the space that it's a shame, especially at a post-Tarkovskian as well as post-Pixarian time, that he didn't do it more excessively then. For in this case we have a master abstractionist understanding another. There are plunges, and for those I'm grateful, and they're done in an appropriately meditative manner. Also, I could've done without the dance bits. I guess I'm just a bit too hip about the whole thing nowadays.
All in all, this is a ravishing film, which I recommend you watch not only as an admirer of architecture for how well you can get into GaudA 's architecture, but also as a cinematic explorer of space because how well you can grasp the basic things about dimension through this film, as well as the abstractions of perception. Better teachers than this are scarce. Highly recommended.
With best regards, AK
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Antonio Gaudi dvd movie.