“Arkhitekton” in Greek — “master builder” in English. The world that we humans have created around us is a world of stone; cold, stoic, though not unnatural. Every material we have used originated, in some form, in the Earth itself. The forms, too, refer back to the ancient structures that served us before we developed the techniques and machinery to reconstruct them — buildings and rooms like the caves in which we once dwelt, tarmac roads like the stone and dirt paths on which we once walked. After Aquarela, Victor Kossakovsky’s 2018 meditation on water and our relationship with it, he turns his attention to stone, a substance infinitely less fluid, yet equally primal and fundamental to our lives, with Architecton.
So much for the master builder — Architecton’s opening scene exposes us as master destroyers. Drone footage surveys destroyed buildings in Ukraine, apartment blocks split apart by Russian bombs, the interiors of bisected flats still in place. It’s an astonishing sight, and it’s the first of many in this typically stunning Kossakovsky feature. A strip mine reveals a magnificent subterranean collage of rock strata hundreds of meters deep; a lone dog skips up the steps of an old deserted stone town, captured in shimmering black-and-white; a slow-motion explosion launches an extraordinary barrage of rocks forth in a chaotic display that almost resembles CGI in its wondrous visual abstraction, the most memorable image in a film replete with them. Throughout, though, the sense of loss, both intentional — warfare, industry — and natural — earthquake, landslide — permeates. We deprive our planet of its stone to erect our dwelling places, and both the earth and we ourselves deprive us of those places.
Yet destruction and creation are two sides of the same stony coin. Kossakovsky is not just an observational cinematic poet, he’s also a chronicler of simple human stories, and he devotes much of Architecton to a simple yet symbolic afternoon task. On a snowy winter day, Italian architect Michele de Lucchi is crafting, with the aid of two workmen, a plain stone circle in his garden. The stones are small and set into the grass, the process is brief and quite banal, the end result ostensibly unassuming. But it’s an act of creation, the likes of which de Lucchi is intimately invested in as an architect. His materials are natural, not the concrete that he bemoans in the film’s final scene, solemnly conversing with Kossakovsky about the inelegant, functional, unnatural constructions that he and others the world over are currently building. “We need a new idea of beauty,” he remarks. A circle of rocks, quasi-sacred in its humility, may be the most beautiful thing in the film. The next scene, over which the end credits roll, watches a stone pipe pump out lines of concrete layer after layer.
If stone is often considered a heavy, burdensome material, this film is comparatively light and buoyant. Kossakovsky’s shots rarely linger long, his scenes propelling forward from one topic to another by the breadth of his focus. Architecton thus feels less meditative than Aquarela, more tributary to its subject in seemingly investigating as many conceivable uses for and manifestations of stone as it can. It’s gentle and contemplative one moment, then vibrant and animated the next, enlivening its essentially motionless subject such that it develops an amiable, multifaceted character. Kossakovsky attempts multiple means of achieving this, and his hit rate isn’t absolute — there’s plenty of incredible innovation, though a few scenes where his stylings are more curious than innovative. One sequence is sullied by an inexplicable lyrical choice by composer Evgueni Galperine, whose music is otherwise an integral accent to cinematographer Ben Bernhard’s exquisite images. But most of Architecton works fabulously, and its variety is central to its success.
Where Kossakovsky is most successful, then, is in expertly sourcing and capturing dazzling displays of stone in its natural state, a reminder that the buildings that we’ve set upon the ground in fact came from that very ground. And the layers of that strip mine, like the abandoned streets of the old town, tell a story of our planet, a story that began long before our arrival upon it and that will continue long after our departure. Stone endures, even when broken down so fine that it flows like liquid. The concrete, steel, and glass of our modern structures may not, or, in de Lucchi’s opinion perhaps, must not, if we’re to find this new idea of beauty and live in harmony with the planet of which we are just one more naturally occurring part. Stone belongs to the Earth, the master builder of all that we know.
DIRECTOR: Victor Kossakovsky; DISTRIBUTOR: A24; IN THEATERS: August 1; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 38 min.
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