FILM
Antonio Gaudi on Criterion DVD
/ Andy Beta
05.23.08
Comparing notes with a critic friend once, she said that it was far easier to slam an album than a film, in that four-track solo recording projects can get dismissed out of hand (just ask my garbageman), while art departments with seven-figure budgets and a troop of set decorators cannot be dismissed so readily. Despite auteur theories to the contrary, film remains a collaborative art between a mass of people, disciplines (be they creative or financial), and departments. It’s a leviathan, a precarious relay from production to final product that can be derailed at any given link.
The art form that bears the closest resemblance in sheer manpower is architecture, though a single auteur or Pharaoh often gets that credit too. We associate superstar architects like Rem Koolhaus and Santiago Calatrava with their vision and their buildings—there’s no room in the history books for underlings and collaborators. Yet in the recent Criterion DVD release of Antonio Gaudí, Japanese filmmaker Hiroshi Teshigahara’s reverent homage to the Catalan architect, Teshigahara hints (perhaps unwittingly) at this collaborative process by elevating the score of longtime collaborator Toru Takemitsu to a prominent position within the documentary. More than anyone else, it is this “voice” that resonates.
While not attempting here to fully unpack the place of Antoni Plàcid Guillem Gaudí i Cornet among the twentieth century’s pantheon of profound geniuses, certainly in a handful of increasingly controversial commissions he received at the turn of the century to design apartment buildings, public parks, and churches in Barcelona, Gaudi anticipated the twentieth century’s greatest art trends while making functional—albeit flummoxing—structures. Park Güell, Casa Vicens, Casa Batlló, La Padrera, Sagrada Familia:embedded in their tile and ironwork, their melting façades and flying buttresses turned arboreal, lay the seeds that would one day bloom into Cubism, Surrealism, abstract sculpture, the melting psychedelic art of the sixties, and avant-garde architecture: Gaudí is paternas familias to both Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso, Le Corbusier and Frank Gehry.
The art form that bears the closest resemblance in sheer manpower is architecture, though a single auteur or Pharaoh often gets that credit too. We associate superstar architects like Rem Koolhaus and Santiago Calatrava with their vision and their buildings—there’s no room in the history books for underlings and collaborators. Yet in the recent Criterion DVD release of Antonio Gaudí, Japanese filmmaker Hiroshi Teshigahara’s reverent homage to the Catalan architect, Teshigahara hints (perhaps unwittingly) at this collaborative process by elevating the score of longtime collaborator Toru Takemitsu to a prominent position within the documentary. More than anyone else, it is this “voice” that resonates.
While not attempting here to fully unpack the place of Antoni Plàcid Guillem Gaudí i Cornet among the twentieth century’s pantheon of profound geniuses, certainly in a handful of increasingly controversial commissions he received at the turn of the century to design apartment buildings, public parks, and churches in Barcelona, Gaudi anticipated the twentieth century’s greatest art trends while making functional—albeit flummoxing—structures. Park Güell, Casa Vicens, Casa Batlló, La Padrera, Sagrada Familia:embedded in their tile and ironwork, their melting façades and flying buttresses turned arboreal, lay the seeds that would one day bloom into Cubism, Surrealism, abstract sculpture, the melting psychedelic art of the sixties, and avant-garde architecture: Gaudí is paternas familias to both Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso, Le Corbusier and Frank Gehry.