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NEW 35MM PRINT!
One of the more improbable art house hits of the last few years was the revival of Teshigahara’s enchanting “documentary” about the architecture of Catalan fabulist Antonio Gaudí, which sold out screenings across the United States, drawing a diverse audience of cinephiles, architecture and design enthusiasts, not to mention new agers attracted by Gaudí’s credo, “Anything created by human beings is already in the great book of Nature.” (Anyone who sees Antonioni’s THE PASSENGER, screening on August 2, will also want to see this.) Teshigahara’s awe in the face of Gaudí’s extravagant, “organic” architecture is evident in his every image, renewing the meaning of that banal phrase “visual poetry.” The Japanese director was overwhelmed by his encounter with Gaudí’s Casa Millà, whose flamboyance he felt was the embodiment of his life-long dream to break the artificial boundaries between the arts. The film captures the sweep and strangeness of Gaudí’s work in Barcelona, his hive-like buildings with their elaborate frescoes, fantastic towers, ornate lattices, and undulating turrets, and takes us to a village in the Pyrenees with houses that look like stone igloos, before ending at the Temple de la Sagrada Família, considered Gaudí’s masterpiece. Accompanying the eye-filling images is a music score by Toru Takemitsu, which transmutes Catalonian folk pieces into sounds as eccentric as Gaudí’s architecture. “Teshigahara lets the buildings speak for themselves, stepping aside to let us gaze in slack-jawed amazement – it’s nothing short of thrilling” (LA Weekly).
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