Spoilers herein.
This DVD held supreme promise. Gaudi is the singular visionary in exploring the outposts of dimensional abstraction and leaving us some maps. Just as Shakespeare used words to invent what it means to be human, Gaudi did so with space. Just as one cannot have a meaningful relationship with language without exposure to Shakespeare, so too no one can really live in the built world without knowing Gaudi.
But not everyone can visit these places. Ordinary photographs cannot even remotely convey the dynamics of how the dimensional energy of these spaces subliminally permeates the mind. And in any case, most photos are on the celebrated exteriors, and that's not the element that's magical: it is the interiors that are truly architectural genius. The exteriors (except with the chapel) are merely sculptural. So one expects film to do a better job, getting closer to being there, even exceeding it in some ways. After all, the problem of architecture and film is a well-studied problem after Welles.
And what better filmmaker than Teshigahara? I saw his `Woman in Dunes' in 1965 and it changed my life -- because it was a masterful synthesis of the organic and abstract, and because it was so centrally visual in narrative. You should know that Barcelonians destroyed much of Gaudi's work, and generally ignored the rest until world interest was focused by the Japanese, prominent among them the Teshigahara family. Only then did Gaudi-inspired tourism explode, work on the Temple resume and the city become visually progressive at the taxpayer level.
The Teshigahara family in fact reinvented ikeban, the art of Japanese flower arrangement in as radical a way, and in the same direction as Gaudi's vision. And for the same reason: and in part to the same effect -- giving a culture a way to meaningfully define themselves. Do a search on the web for the Sogetsu school to see what I mean.
Both men have a notion of visual metaphoric grammar as fluid, organic flow. So I was expecting a lot. Any exposure to Gaudi is worthwhile, but I must say that this film disappoints -- not so much because it is bad but because we might have gotten that rare thing: a genius seen by a genius: deep works of beauty transformed into a different beauty and depth.
Problems:
-- The architecture is set in the context of everyday Barcelonians. Surely that is true from the perspective of energy flowing into the everyday soul. But it is hardly the other way. Gaudi was influenced by a highly abstract notion of place and religion which was and still is beyond the reach of the person in the street. Adding them is just wrong -- it distracts and misinforms. Better to have shown people in Morocco.
-- We still have a fixation on postcard exteriors. Teshigahara knows better.
-- The interiors are photographed with natural light and from eye height as a real viewer would experience. The camera pans slowly. Where it dwells, it does so on the striking details, much as a viewer would. But this is not what the situation requires: the camera is never an adequate surrogate for the eye alone. It must be somewhat god-like as well. No art can be found here in lighting these wonderful spaces, no art in providing registering perspectives for eidetic contemplation, no art in editing the way our mind would direct the eye if it were as unconstrained as Teshigahara's vision. Often, the eye dwells on something completely irrelevant and unrelated to Gaudi or the spatial effect, for instance the Madonna in the Chapel's Crypt.
-- The score is welcome as an alternative to babbling scholars. But it is so inapt it grates. Gaudi's vision is deeply seated in the natural world. The music in his mind would have been exclusively vocal, mostly female, probably percussive. We would have heard discontinuous syncopations with probably Arab threads weaving an unperceived tapestry. A shame, really, what we have instead.
-- I would have expected more attention to supersaturating the colors. This would have been more like being there. The real eye can see many times more variations in color than a photograph can show. If Gaudi were there, he would have pushed the color stops as far as they would go. That would have been more `real.'
-- The film focuses on the artifacts. This is fine, but sometimes is strays into a focus on the man. This is fine too. But the bridge between the two is never touched: the man was the last masterbuilder in the sense of a great designer who also engaged in the actual details of construction. He worked with the craftsmen in real time to design stuff as it was coming into being: thus the design was not just organic, so was the design process.
Oh well, one weaver of life is a series of missed opportunities at greatness. But we cannot let us be distracted from appreciating the sublime when it comes close. See this. Visit Barcelona, especially the Chapel's Crypt. It should be on your list of things to do before you die, especially if you have a cinematic consciousness. I was there recently for three days and the only other visitors were three Japanese.
Gaudi is "katachi," a Japanese concept for which there is no western translation -- it means roughly: beauty from symmetry/assymmetry and balance with a very close attunement to natural forces.
This DVD held supreme promise. Gaudi is the singular visionary in exploring the outposts of dimensional abstraction and leaving us some maps. Just as Shakespeare used words to invent what it means to be human, Gaudi did so with space. Just as one cannot have a meaningful relationship with language without exposure to Shakespeare, so too no one can really live in the built world without knowing Gaudi.
But not everyone can visit these places. Ordinary photographs cannot even remotely convey the dynamics of how the dimensional energy of these spaces subliminally permeates the mind. And in any case, most photos are on the celebrated exteriors, and that's not the element that's magical: it is the interiors that are truly architectural genius. The exteriors (except with the chapel) are merely sculptural. So one expects film to do a better job, getting closer to being there, even exceeding it in some ways. After all, the problem of architecture and film is a well-studied problem after Welles.
And what better filmmaker than Teshigahara? I saw his `Woman in Dunes' in 1965 and it changed my life -- because it was a masterful synthesis of the organic and abstract, and because it was so centrally visual in narrative. You should know that Barcelonians destroyed much of Gaudi's work, and generally ignored the rest until world interest was focused by the Japanese, prominent among them the Teshigahara family. Only then did Gaudi-inspired tourism explode, work on the Temple resume and the city become visually progressive at the taxpayer level.
The Teshigahara family in fact reinvented ikeban, the art of Japanese flower arrangement in as radical a way, and in the same direction as Gaudi's vision. And for the same reason: and in part to the same effect -- giving a culture a way to meaningfully define themselves. Do a search on the web for the Sogetsu school to see what I mean.
Both men have a notion of visual metaphoric grammar as fluid, organic flow. So I was expecting a lot. Any exposure to Gaudi is worthwhile, but I must say that this film disappoints -- not so much because it is bad but because we might have gotten that rare thing: a genius seen by a genius: deep works of beauty transformed into a different beauty and depth.
Problems:
-- The architecture is set in the context of everyday Barcelonians. Surely that is true from the perspective of energy flowing into the everyday soul. But it is hardly the other way. Gaudi was influenced by a highly abstract notion of place and religion which was and still is beyond the reach of the person in the street. Adding them is just wrong -- it distracts and misinforms. Better to have shown people in Morocco.
-- We still have a fixation on postcard exteriors. Teshigahara knows better.
-- The interiors are photographed with natural light and from eye height as a real viewer would experience. The camera pans slowly. Where it dwells, it does so on the striking details, much as a viewer would. But this is not what the situation requires: the camera is never an adequate surrogate for the eye alone. It must be somewhat god-like as well. No art can be found here in lighting these wonderful spaces, no art in providing registering perspectives for eidetic contemplation, no art in editing the way our mind would direct the eye if it were as unconstrained as Teshigahara's vision. Often, the eye dwells on something completely irrelevant and unrelated to Gaudi or the spatial effect, for instance the Madonna in the Chapel's Crypt.
-- The score is welcome as an alternative to babbling scholars. But it is so inapt it grates. Gaudi's vision is deeply seated in the natural world. The music in his mind would have been exclusively vocal, mostly female, probably percussive. We would have heard discontinuous syncopations with probably Arab threads weaving an unperceived tapestry. A shame, really, what we have instead.
-- I would have expected more attention to supersaturating the colors. This would have been more like being there. The real eye can see many times more variations in color than a photograph can show. If Gaudi were there, he would have pushed the color stops as far as they would go. That would have been more `real.'
-- The film focuses on the artifacts. This is fine, but sometimes is strays into a focus on the man. This is fine too. But the bridge between the two is never touched: the man was the last masterbuilder in the sense of a great designer who also engaged in the actual details of construction. He worked with the craftsmen in real time to design stuff as it was coming into being: thus the design was not just organic, so was the design process.
Oh well, one weaver of life is a series of missed opportunities at greatness. But we cannot let us be distracted from appreciating the sublime when it comes close. See this. Visit Barcelona, especially the Chapel's Crypt. It should be on your list of things to do before you die, especially if you have a cinematic consciousness. I was there recently for three days and the only other visitors were three Japanese.
Gaudi is "katachi," a Japanese concept for which there is no western translation -- it means roughly: beauty from symmetry/assymmetry and balance with a very close attunement to natural forces.