It would be easy to dismiss Antonio Gaudi, a 1985 documentary on the Catalan architect composed almost entirely of visual meditations on his surrealist-tinged buildings (most famously, Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia), as snob’s eye candy, stoner background A/V for the NPR set. But aside from the occasional tourism-promo wade through bland local colors (every street fair is different, every street fair is the same), it’s the antithesis of the passivity that mars similar artist montages. In 72 vital, thesis-driven minutes, director Hiroshi Teshigahara, most famous for his abstract-chic Kobo Abe adaptations Woman in the Dunes and The Face of Another, draws out the most idiosyncratic details of Gaudi’s often astounding buildings, and frames their structural oddities against the Barcelona skyline, forging Gaudi’s work into a treatise on the potential for strangeness within the modern urban landscape. (It’s no wonder Antonioni used Gaudi’s buildings for Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider’s first meetings in The Passenger.) Cinema Village is reviving the film for a weeklong run starting this Friday, just in time for Antonio Gaudi’s turreted, undulating inexplicabilities to claim their rightful place as the summer movie calendar’s truest instance of escapism.
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