Hiroshi Teshigahara

Antonio Gaudí

Antonio Gaudí

Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí (1852–1926) designed some of the world’s most astonishing buildings, interiors, and parks; Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara constructed some of the most aesthetically audacious films ever made. In Antonio Gaudí, their artistry melds in a unique, enthralling cinematic experience. Less a documentary than a visual poem, Teshigahara’s film takes viewers on a tour of Gaudí’s truly spectacular architecture, including his massive, still-unfinished master­piece, the Sagrada Família basilica in Barcelona. With camera work as bold and sensual as the curves of his subject’s organic structures, Teshigahara immortalizes Gaudí on film.

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Film Info

  • Japan
  • 1984
  • 72 minutes
  • Color
  • 1.33:1
  • Japanese
  • Spine #425

BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

  • High-definition digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
  • Interview from 2008 with architect Arata Isozaki
  • Gaudí, Catalunya, 1959, footage from director Hiroshi Teshigahara’s first trip to Spain
  • God’s Architect: Antoni Gaudí, an hour-long documentary from 2003 on the architect’s life and work
  • BBC program from 1961 on Gaudí by filmmaker Ken Russell
  • Sculptures by Sofu—Vita, a 1963 short film by Teshigahara on the sculpture work of his father, Sofu Teshigahara
  • Trailer
  • PLUS: An essay by art historian Dore Ashton, a 1986 reminiscence by Hiroshi Teshigahara, and excerpts from a 1959 conversation among the Teshigaharas and others about their trip to the West

    Cover by Sarah Habibi

Purchase Options

BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

  • High-definition digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
  • Interview from 2008 with architect Arata Isozaki
  • Gaudí, Catalunya, 1959, footage from director Hiroshi Teshigahara’s first trip to Spain
  • God’s Architect: Antoni Gaudí, an hour-long documentary from 2003 on the architect’s life and work
  • BBC program from 1961 on Gaudí by filmmaker Ken Russell
  • Sculptures by Sofu—Vita, a 1963 short film by Teshigahara on the sculpture work of his father, Sofu Teshigahara
  • Trailer
  • PLUS: An essay by art historian Dore Ashton, a 1986 reminiscence by Hiroshi Teshigahara, and excerpts from a 1959 conversation among the Teshigaharas and others about their trip to the West

    Cover by Sarah Habibi
Antonio Gaudí
Cast
Isidre Puig Boada
Interviewee
Seiji Miyaguchi
Boada's voice-over
Credits
Director
Hiroshi Teshigahara
Producer
Hiroshi Teshigahara
Editor
Hiroshi Teshigahara
Supervisor
Juan Bassegoda Nonell
Cinematography
Junichi Segawa
Cinematography
Yoshikazu Yanagida
Cinematography
Ryu Segawa
Music and sound effects by
Toru Takemitsu
Music and sound effects by
Kurodo Mori
Music and sound effects by
Shinji Hori
Sound recordist
Koji Asari
Editor
Eiko Yoshida
Producer
Noriko Nomura

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Current

Antonio Gaudí: Border Crossings
Antonio Gaudí: Border Crossings
During the Second World War, when Hiroshi Teshigahara was a schoolboy, Japan’s cities—above all his hometown, Tokyo—were mercilessly firebombed. He, and his future associates in countless artistic undertakings, returned to a landscape of bleak …

By Dore Ashton

Essays — Mar 18, 2008
A Camera Dancing About Architecture
A Camera Dancing About Architecture
Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Antonio Gaudí is one of the most sensual films ever made—and there are hardly any people in it. In this poetic documentary—available to stream for free this week on Hulu as part of our Cityscapes festival…
Short Takes — Oct 16, 2012

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Toru Takemitsu

Composer

Toru Takemitsu
Toru Takemitsu

Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, known to Western listeners predominantly as the man behind the music in such iconic movies as Woman in the Dunes and Ran, was an acclaimed classical composer and music theorist well before he became one of his country’s most reliably brilliant scorers of film. A noted musical avant-gardist in midcentury Japanese intellectual circles, as influenced by jazz as by Debussy, Takemitsu first turned to feature film composing when he was commissioned (along with Masaru Sato) to write the hip, twangy-guitar-inflected score for the Ko Nakahira youth flick Crazed Fruit (1956). It wasn’t until a few years later, though, when his friend Hiroshi Teshigahara asked him to score Teshigahara’s short debut film, José Torres (1959), that Takemitsu’s career in movies truly began. The deeply sympathetic working relationship that they discovered on that project resulted in Takemitsu’s providing the haunting, instrumentally jarring themes for virtually all of Teshigahara’s subsequent output (“He was always more than a composer,” Teshigahara would recall. “He involved himself so thoroughly in every aspect of a film—script, casting, location shooting, editing, and total sound design”). Takemitsu became a go-to guy for many other major Japanese filmmakers as well, including Masaki Kobayashi (Harakiri), Akira Kurosawa (Dodes’ka-den), and Nagisa Oshima (Empire of Passion); his themes remain some of the most beautiful, spectral music ever written for the screen.

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