Antonio Gaudí

Hiroshi Teshigahara's film about Antonio Gaudí isn't so much a conventional narrative biography as a tone poem. For the first half-hour of this 72-minute work, we're told almost nothing about the visionary architect's life. We see shots of Barcelona, the buildings that Gaudí designed at the turn of the century, the works of Miró and Picasso, whom he influenced, the Romanesque churches and frescoes that influenced him -- and all with no narration, except for the occasional identifying subtitle.

Teshigahara is apparently hoping to present a view of Gaudí uncorrupted by "interpretation." To an extent, the strategy works. He has a feel for the erotic, mystical-organic contours of Gaudí's design. Angled stone columns, scalloped balustrades, oblong windows and doors, chimneys that stare like hooded, gapemouthed figures -- Gaudí's biomorphic forms seem to defy their medium; they're like dripped clay. Yet the film, with its evocative Toru Takemitsu score, makes a strong case for the architect not as gross sensualist but as a religious ascetic.

In the last 20 minutes, Teshigahara begins to develop a narrative. We see plans, still photographs; there's an interview (finally!) with one of Gaudí's collaborators in the construction of Barcelona's Templo de la Sagrada Familia. (Work on this monumental cathedral began in 1882, when Gaudí was 31, and has continued to this day.) Since Teshigahara violates the purity of his conception by relating an anecdote anyway, you may be even more exasperated that he didn't modify his approach from the start. He wants to convey the experience of Gaudí's architecture undiluted -- but film doesn't have architecture's ability to transform space, and in the end it's something his camera simply can't do. At the Museum of Fine Arts.

-- Jon Garelick