The hosted architectural documentary on British television: Ian Nairn and the personalization of place

Abstract

Film and television are uniquely able to convey architectural experience. Through camera movements, editing, framing, tracking through space, and/or isolating details from a larger whole, these moving images produce space. On the one hand they are a decent proxy for the experience of actually being in a place; on the other they provide a representational means of going beyond the capacities of individual experience. Films about architecture can construct the experience of buildings, and can give us new subjective positions from which to consider them. Take, for instance, Hiroshi Teshigahara’s theatrical documentary Antonio Gaudí (1984), a meditative look at the celebrated Catalan architect’s buildings, in particular as they define the visual townscape of Barcelona. Part of what endears the film to critics is its reliance on style and aesthetics to build the Gaudí experience. Dore Ashton writes of Teshigahara’s ‘wonderfully paced rhythmic sequences’ that evince ‘the precision of a good art historian’, such that style matches the demands of content, as when ‘his craftsman’s eye for detail […] scans with his camera the particulars of Gaudí’s sculptural fantasies’.1 Linda C. Ehrlich describes the success of the film by way of its voluntary limitations: ‘Most of Antonio Gaudí is without any narrative explanation except for the occasional subtitle to identify a building, set to hypnotic music by award winning composer Takemitsu Toru, as well as European processional music’.2 The architecture critic Paul Gapp, while praising the film for its absence of editorial overlay, also recognizes the ability of moving images to capture the essence of the built environment: ‘A motion picture about Gaudí's buildings is not only a delicious visual experience but also reveals far better than still photography the engineering skill of the Spanish master and the virtuosity of the artisans who followed his plans’.3 The discourse around Teshigahara’s Antonio Gaudí is that it is successful in its capacity as a ‘pure’ film about architecture, one unadulterated by the potentially muddling and pedantic commonplaces of documentary production such as talking-head interviews or an excessive reliance on decontextualized archival footage.