Antonio Gaudí
It’s very easy to blog about this movie. First of all, I liked it and can rave about it indefinitely, which is convenient because everybody enjoys listening to praises. A praise can be serious or funny – most of all it’s inoffensive, whereas criticism is best with some humor (which we all know I am terrible at). Second, the film is somewhat critically acclaimed. Criterion has 4 of Teshigahara’s movies, of which “Antonio Gaudí” is certainly the least accessible one, yet nobody will doubt that the film has some artistic merit. You won’t feel like reading a shiny example of bad taste when I tell you that I loved the film, much au contraire. Yet finally, and that is perhaps the most important point, the film is so obscure and weird that nobody will probably want to see it. Pip and I are rabid Teshigahara fans, which is the very reason we saw this movie to begin with, but most people at not. I can probably say whatever I want about the movie, and nobody will feel offended because they don’t know the film nor will they feel like watching it. This is an almost dialogue-free documentary about Antonio Gaudí aka the master of strange architecture after all. You will quickly see that you don’t really have any reason to see this film unless you are a Teshigahara fanboy (check!) and interested in Gaudí’s architecture (check!).
The lack of dialogue is probably the film’s most distinctive feature. But let me digress first. I have previously said that I expect good dialogue unless the director is Tarkovsky. Of course I said that on a whim, but it is mostly true. The same strangely applies to Teshigahara, but for a slightly different reason. At first glance, Tarkovsky and Teshigahara have a few things in common. They are both masters of visual beauty, probably more so than any other directors I know, and both of their films hinge on supernatural or science-fiction elements while uncovering some humanity or human condition. Even if the stories are entirely different, I get the feeling that Tarkovsky and Teshigahara are largely looking for the same thing in their films, which can often be understood as allegories or parables, making the films feel timeless. The existentialist “who are we?” question is ubiquitous in all of their films. They also both didn’t make very many movies and liked to adapt literature but that is rather minor and can be said about many others. Cultural differences aside (of which I don’t really see any), I find their use of image to be very different. Tarkovsky’s cinematography is utterly beautiful because it creates atmosphere. We accept that his films are slow because these beautiful images set the mood and are thus necessary to the experience of the film. In fact, I feel like Tarkovsky could make anything look beautiful, he’s like a pre-2000 Instagram except with a distinct personal style. To Tarkovsky, dialogue is meant to make an impact, and sparsity of it helps to emphasize the relatively thin, but important plot. Teshigahara seems to be the exact opposite to me. His films are not exactly lacking in dialogue (or at least it doesn’t feel like that to me), and we do not linger on shots for that long. But what really creates this feeling of density is my impression that these images have something to say. A long time ago I read in a review on “Woman in the Dunes” that the sand is the film’s greatest main protagonist. All these mesmerizing images in Teshigahara’s films have a meaning, symbolic or no, and one gets the feeling that these images partake in the storytelling and – partially – drive the plot. It’s not like Teshigahara’s films have no atmosphere, but I would say that the way he composes his shots goes beyond providing a ‘background setting’.
Long story short, I believe that if there is a director who can pull off a dialogue-free film it is Teshigahara, precisely because his images speak. The first ~60 minutes are composed and edited in a way that we actually learn about Gaudí’s work, by the “simple” juxtaposition of various imagery. A combination of panorama shots and close-ups of details shows aspects of the buildings we may not have seen if we had stood in front of them, and context is provided by the little dialogue we get, and more importantly by snapshots of secondary material such as construction drawings or shots of medieval artwork. What’s more, Teshigahara photographs everyday people interacting with these buildings. It is Teshigahara’s eye for beauty which allows this film to strive and bring out the best of Gaudí’s work.
The film ends with a quote translated into Japanese and Spanish written with the Sagrada familia in the background that was only shown for a relatively short period of time. I was amused to see that I was able to read and process the Spanish translation of the quote while the text was shown, but was practically unable to read the Japanese one. It’s not surprising, but a little sad! I never studied Spanish seriously and probably already spent way more time on Japanese. But vocabulary is a bitch…
The only thing “Antonio Gaudí” lacks is Teshigahara’s usual subtle black humor (which blatantly serious Tarkovsky completely avoids), one of the reasons why I like “Pitfall” so much. But hey this is a documentary, I expected to be bored and ended up quite interested in Gaudí’s work now. If that isn’t an achievement, what is?
PS. If you are still here after my tl;dr post, someone wrote an awesome review on the film.