While Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara is best known for his surreal and beautiful Woman in the Dunes, he also created one of the most enigmatic architecture documentaries ever put to film with his profile of the equally enigmatic Spanish architect Antionio Gaudí. The AFI is drawing their short retrospective on the director to a close this weekend with two screenings of the film, which is more visual fantasia than informative biography. In fact, if you know nothing about Gaudí going in, you’d do well to do a little preparatory web reading for background’s sake. Teshigahara’s objective was never really to profile the man, who, while fascinating in his own right, could never be quite as spell-binding as the fantastical constructions that sprung from his mind. Teshigahara instead constructs a visual poem, paying tribute to Gaudí by exploring the architect’s work with his camera, and accompanying the visuals with a striking score by Toru Takemitsu, punctuated by the occasional biographical subtitle.
We couldn’t find a trailer online, but this clip gives a pretty good sense of what the experience is like.
Saturday and Sunday evening at the AFI.
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If you see packs of sleep-deprived looking folks breaking into spontaneous attacks of acting on the streets and filming this behavior this weekend, please don’t do anything to delay them: they’re on a strict deadline. The annual 48 Hour Film Project rolls into town this week, as teams of filmmakers with a taste for adventure, challenge, and large intakes of caffeine are given two days to write, rehearse, shoot, and edit a short film in a genre to be determined when the event kicks off at the Warehouse Theater on Friday night. After 48 hours of fevered work, they’ll turn in their results for judging, and the AFI will have screenings of the films next week. Experience tells us that the crop tends to vary pretty widely in quality, but there are always some gems in there. And, on the flipside, a few that fall into the realm of so-bad-they’re-hilarious.
Teams are filming over the weekend, and films will screen at the AFI from Tuesday through Friday. Be sure to buy tickets in advance, as these often sell out.
