New Print!

Hiroshi Teshigahara's Antonio Gaudí is “that rare film that unreels its shock gradually, over a span of 72 minutes. . . . Though Gaudí, ostensibly a documentary, follows the career of the turn-of-the-century medievalist architect and Catalan nationalist in more or less the expected chronology, few films foreground the spatial over the temporal so purely as this one. Gaudí . . . limits itself to filming only Gaudí's baroque, politically metaphorical work, often suggesting that this should suffice as biography. It also limits itself to a minimalist narration of silent, efficient subtitles . . . and a soundtrack that rarely ventures beyond Toru Takemitsu's relentlessly haunting score. . . . Teshigahara and Takemitsu have built a masterpiece out of the works of a kindred artist. In doing so, they answer imperatives that were once the obligation of artists, to enlighten and purify the soul and to take it out of time.”