Three of these films, 1962’s Pitfall, 1964’s art house watermark Woman in the Dunes, and 1966’s The Face of Another were collected late last year in a boxset (also from Criterion), emphasizing the creative relationship between Teshigahara and Abe, yet curiously downplaying Takemitsu’s evocative input. The first collaboration is the confounding Pitfall. Part ghost story, part murder-mystery, part documentary exposé, part allegory, it’s a morass held together by Takemitsu’s outbursts of prepared piano, harpsichord, and echoing scrapes that resound as if from the bottom of a cistern. For 1966’s film The Face of Another, Takemitsu juxtaposes a stately Viennese waltz with eerie swells of glass harmonica. It can’t quite make the story of a man who has a face transplant work though. John Updike once called Abe’s no exit situations “cheap suspense” and a good source of “readerly exasperation,” and these two films are prime examples of it, feeling more like over-extended episodes from The Twilight Zone, pregnant with an inescapable dread. After another feature from this triumvirate, Teshigahara returned to his family’s business, a career interrupted only to bring Gaudí to fruition in 1984.

Despite the intervening decades between Teshigahara’s nascent explorations using a handheld 16mm to his cinematic career and return to Barcelona, the ordering of his film remains remarkably similar to those first impressions he captured in his home movies. He opens with shots of fountains, alleys, La Rambla, the city’s main thoroughfare. There is no telltale sign of Gaudi’s landmarks until nearly eight minutes in. Instead, he captures festive street scenes, the massive folk dances of the Catalan locals. It would seem comforting, quaint and folky, were it not for an overlay of ambient sound from longtime Teshigahara collaborator, Toru Takemitsu. In fact, were it not for Takemitsu’s contributions, there would be little to distinguish this film from those early home movies.

Credited as director, editor, and producer, what makes Teshigahara’s late work on the architect resonate on a visceral level is not so much the captured imagery but rather Takemitsu’s astounding soundtrack that moves alongside the visions. Eschewing documentarian earmarks like voiceover, talking heads, historical backstory, and polemics, instead it’s a half-hour before the first words are uttered, an hour before Teshigahara’s brief narration emerges.

Yet throughout, Takemitsu enthralls viewers with his cues and motifs, gives voice to the surreal imagery unfurling before us. Pipe organ themes somehow clothe the mysteries of faith in terrestrial notes, at times the timbres as melted, alien, and resplendent as the buildings themselves. A nineteen note descending scale recreates the vertigo that Sagrada’s spires inspire. Picturesque scenes of neighborhood life (these circle dances, live lobsters in the market, children dashing through Park Güell’s Doric columns) become foreign and disconcerting with an overlay of organic drones from a glass harmonica. Takemitsu’s music becomes syneasthetic, rendering and rearranging our sight anew, so that a truly alien world can be fully integrated into and inhabit this terrestrial one, yet remain transporting. While Teshigahara is no doubt the auteur, receiving the credit for capturing Gaudí’s architecture on celluloid, Toru Takemitsu encapsulates it best. In his structures are housed such celestial tones, the soundtrack here the most apt emulation of Gaudí’s own lifework.