“The teacher is the tree outside the window,” the architect famously quipped, not only distancing his self from his creations but noting the True Creator (Gaudí increasingly became a religious aesthete and zealot). Such nature walk visions of Gaudi transferred to the realm of man, while the flux of nature transferred to his unbudging materials of metal and cement. As Teshigahara and camera roves through Barcelona, as viewers we too stroll and stumble upon these uncanny structures, which appear to be carved of stalactites, gigantic seed pods, rainforest plants, aquatic coral while also seeming otherworldly. Fibonacci spirals inform the stone staircases at Sagrada Familia, while the church’s nativity scene springs forth like Star Trek flora, an open palm with an eye in the middle of it. As the camera look on, so too does that eye appear to gaze back at us in the film.

Yet the tile configurations, the wrought iron, the lampshades and railings spring not from Gaudí alone, but also from the handiwork of his craftsmen and collaborators, men relegated to footnotes, such as Berenguer de Palazol, Josep Maria Jujol Gibert, Domènech Sugrañes, Isidre Puig Boada, Bonet Garí, Juan Bergós Massó. It’s Jujol’s shards of tile on the snaking benches out at Park Güell that anticipate Cubism, the cantilevered lamps and vineyard lattices of metal from Pere Falqués that make the unreal tactile.

Teshigahara, while still a teen, made a pilgrimage to the city (captured on 16mm footage on the second disc of this set) to bear witness to these enduring structures, which made him realize “that the lines between the arts are insignificant. Gaudi made me feel that the world in which I was living still left a great many possibilities.” Teshigahara remains an intriguing figure in Japanese cinema. He was the son of Sofu Teshigahara, who founded a flower arrangement school and art discipline, Sogetsu. It’s one thing to rebel against a father who wants you to go into insurance, but quite another to buck against one who invented an entire art aesthetic. Still, Teshigahara avoided the family business and began to dabble in surrealistic painting, indebted to the likes of Spaniards such as Luis Buñuel, Dali, and of course, Gaudi, before moving into film. He worked outside of the studio system (a rarity in those days), setting up his own production company and making documentaries about woodblock artists and USA heavyweight champions. Amongst his circle of similarly inclined bohemian intellectuals, he commenced work on adapting the books of post-war existentialist scribe Kobo Abe for the screen, working closely with the author and composer Toru Takemitsu.