Tag Archives: Hiroshi Teshigahara

The Domestication of Antonio Gaudí

Anuj Malhotra

Teshigahara’s Antonio Gaudí is as great a film on architecture as it is great architecture on film; either way, one man’s great art seems to facilitate another’s. With his pet obsessions (patterns, textures, shapes, designs, material – and how film can alter them) in place, Teshigahara studies Gaudí’s work with great feeling for it. Gaudí’s arches, walls, pillars, columns, windows, benches seem to evoke feelings of extreme wonder, curiosity, humility, overwhelming surprise and gratitude at different points of the film within Teshigahara. These, he then attempts to transmit to his viewers through a corresponding physical (or optical, in certain cases) routine of the camera – for instance, the scalar grandeur of Sagrada Família seems to demand static appreciation, but Gaudí’s ceilings have low-angle Sacha Vierny-type tracking shots assigned to them.

One would imagine that it is but natural that for an architectural film to be successful, the fundamentals of cinema, the sound and the image, must attain their fullest potential. For a building is a real physical structure, it is an erected symbol of permanence and intransience and as such objects go, they can often seem devoid of any real emotion. Their eternality seems to grant them a certain arrogance – no matter who you are, a monument wouldn’t bother with you. Conversely, a building is also a very willing subject, unflinching and immovable, it will wait with endless patience for the filmmaker to set himself up.

With these attributes of his subject so firmly entrenched, it is up to the cinema-man to then make the building still seem like the work of a human hand (or conversely, let the structure sustain its coldness – like in Tati’s Play Time or Scott’s Blade Runner). In order to infuse the concrete with sentiment, therefore, the filmmaker will be compelled to think in terms of cinema and cinema alone. Antonio Gaudí is, if I may submit that the cliché is unavoidable, full of such moments of genuine cinema. Teshigahara overlays his precise but intuitive camera maneuvers with the guttural, cavernous sound of Toru Takemitsu, which seems to rise forever from the basement of an abandoned house or the recesses of a human soul.

The greatest accomplishment of Antonio Gaudí is its ability to assimilate Gaudí’s unique fin-de-siècle architecture into contemporary (1984) Barcelona life. In a very significant moment of the film, the camera admires the ceiling design of an unknown structure. Up till this point in the film, Teshigahara has taken us from one Gaudí to another – refusing sternly to supply us with a textual (supers, intertitles) or verbal (vox-populi, narrations) identification of any of the structures. As such, a viewer may imagine our this present location to just be one of the many, but slowly, the camera pans from one corner of the ceiling to another and then slides down the wall gradually to reveal a family sitting there, conducting their day-to-day chores, unperturbed entirely by the presence of the two great artists in their midst. This shot is a significant introduction to an agenda that the film will pursue diligently through the rest of its duration: the domestication of Gaudí’s sensibility. Or if the film exists outdoors, then its assimilation into the Barcelona city-scape (assimilation into the mainstream is again, a pet concern of Teshigahara’s). It is a significant achievement for Antonio Gaudí, for unlike other great films on artists, like Mystery of Picasso (1956) by Henri-Georges Clouzot which is shot entirely inside a closed dark studio somewhere; this film doesn’t make a systematic refusal to acknowledge anything apart from its subject’s work.

Throughout the film, Teshigahara includes shots of Gaudí’s architecture as part of a larger city – and even more significantly for an artist, a part of the city that its inhabitants accept as routine. Therefore, there are shots of the Sagrada Família framed in the background of a series of images where the foreground is littered with symbols of ordinary everyday life: a family on a picnic, a red-light crossing and clothes drying on a line on a Barcelona rooftop.

Antonio Gaudí ties into the rest of the Teshigahara filmography also via the theme of metamorphoses – his work seems to delve perpetually into this metamorphoses of an object (in Teshigahara, it is crucial to view the human body as a material, a thing) from one form to the other; therefore, a number of his films situate themselves in the middle of this mutation. As a filmmaker, Teshigahara’s pre-occupation remains not the end result of this process, but the process itself – if presented therefore with a ‘work in progress’, he is bound to focus on the ‘progress’, rather than the larger ‘work’. In Antonio Gaudí, Teshigahara devotes the final third of the film to a very material study of the Sagrada Família, not arguably Gaudí’s most famous accomplishment, and yet, incomplete or unfinished. The film contains several shots of the structure surrounded by construction cranes, cement, workers, safety helmets, wooden framework and other modern architectural framework – it is essential therefore, that it is seen as a work-in-progress and a structure built of brick, mortar, ceramics, stained glass and wrought iron. It is also not entirely untrue that the film can sometimes make the site of the church building resemble the laboratory from The Face of Another, where throughout most of the film, a man’s face is the site of a formidable architectural ambition.