I finally watched this very late last night, and my immediate reaction to it is one of mostly boredom, meaning my thoughts often drifted to personal matters unrelated to the film. I considered turning it off at about the halfway point, but I feel like this could possibly be the kind of work that will stick with me for a while. In such instances, I think sometimes it’s wise to soak the whole thing in and then see what magic memory can work on the subject over the coming months or years. After all, I had a similar reaction the first time I saw
Sans Soleil, and it's now one of my favorite films. So I endured.
Given some time to sleep on it, I feel I can articulate my current thoughts a little better. My interest in architecture is casual. I will often spend time in my city and other places admiring buildings or details of buildings, but I simply didn’t find this film to be visually interesting enough to hold my attention for the duration. I certainly don’t mean that as a slight against Gaudi, because his work is, of course, astonishing. For entirely personal reasons, though, on an instinctive level I’m just not drawn to tourist attractions. I don’t mean to discount the power that I’m sure visiting many of these structures has in person, but, pictorially, I simply don’t understand the drive to preserve these images that have no doubt already been recorded millions of times.
With that out of the way, I like to think I always try very hard to find an avenue to appreciate a work of art. I quite like what zedz wrote above:
zedz wrote:I felt that Teshigahara's calm and immersive approach, without a lot of context, was a fine approximation of the experience of visiting the architecture in person.
Just as Mr. Sausage described, I found myself frustrated that Teshigahara repeatedly does not attempt to give the viewer a complete mental portrait of the interior or exterior of the buildings. But I think what zedz wrote rationalizes that in quite a nice way. With this perspective, I think it also makes sense why the camera mostly stays on the ground. I was repeatedly struck by the almost holy reverence Teshigahara seems to be communicating for these structures (in this way, I was reminded of Malick’s last two films.) The buildings are physically and temporally so much greater than any one human. In the film, there is even a quote from Gaudi that was about how Sagrada Família will not be completed in his lifetime, so another architect will take up the project and add something of his own to the structure (and, of course, it has turned into
many architects contributing to the project.)
I, unfortunately, wasn’t struck with this feeling of awe that I think the director intended, but, as I’ve already suggested, I’m not prepared to attack the filmmaker’s techniques or call it a bad film, because I feel my hangups are largely personal. Indeed, judging by the reactions here, it seems like this film has evoked very personal reactions from most of its viewers. I guess I should expect such a thing when the work is described as a “visual poem” right on the back of the DVD box. Like a poem, this film seems to be getting at something ineffable, which I admire, but don't quite understand at the moment.