“Mesmeric” is a word that can be used for all of Victor Kossakovsky’s stunning paeans to the glories of the natural world, in contrast with humanity’s mindless destruction of the beauty around us.
His forceful images of water (Aquarela), volcanoes (¡Vivan las antipodas!) and similar primary powerhouses are the very definition of the Romantics’ understanding of the sublime, terrifying in their potency because they are out of our control, reminding us of just how small we are confronting the elements. Yet mankind has long sought its revenge by pretending to conquer those elements, blithely careening towards self-annihilation. This is part of the story behind Architecton, Kossakovsky’s rumbling roar against the stripping of the earth and war’s devastation, carried along on a clarion call against the built-in obsolescence of contemporary architecture.
Filmed in high definition 48-frames-per-second with an astonishing hard-edged sharpness (more about that below), Architecton has the kind of near-immersive sensation of sitting in a planetarium projection as mountains of rock cascade down in heaving waves, constantly engendering questions about how d.o.p. Ben Bernhard managed to get these images. Opening with drone shots of devastated Ukrainian towns, then shifting to strip mines in Europe, earthquake devastation in Turkey and the ancient ruins of Baalbek, the documentary is designed as a plea to stop our rush for concrete towers that will crumble within four decades or sooner in seismic zones, urging us to think about how to let nature just be, coexisting side by side with a global population woefully accustomed to urban ugliness. Although repetitive at times, the film’s exceptional imagery and accessible message plus Kossakovsky’s cult status will be eagerly welcomed throughout the market.
There are however several flaws in Kossakovksy’s premise. Architecton rails against concrete and sets the glories of classical jewels like Baalbek and the Hellenistic cities of Asia Minor as the ultimate counterpoint, evocative survivors that remain partly standing after more than two millennia in contrast to cement and steel constructions that crumble when the earth shakes. In truth, almost all the ancient cities in what’s now Turkey were devastated by earthquakes, their collapsed columns and up-ended massive tombs scattered across uninhabited landscapes testimony to the simple fact that building in stone and marble is no guarantee of durability in the face of tectonic forces. In addition, the ancient Romans invented concrete – without it, we’d not have the dome of the Pantheon, the most glorious intact building of the ancient world which survived the great 1349 earthquake that caused part of the Colosseum to collapse – so it’s a bit facile to rail against the material itself rather than the people who use it so badly.
The film’s first quarter is the most extraordinary, opening with a prologue in which a slow-moving drone flies over Ukrainian apartment buildings and religious structures shattered by Russia’s ongoing invasion. As the soundtrack rings with trumpets calling out to each other, joined by more brass instruments heralding destruction, the camera takes in urban landscapes that look like dollhouses attacked with mallets: walls are ripped off revealing desks with folders still on top, TVs, paintings, kitchens half-smashed, clothes still hanging in closets. Emptied of people, the eerie carnage stands suspended in war’s timeless vacuum.
Shortly after Kossakovsky shifts to breathtaking mountain eyries and shots of rock and shale filmed in such close-up that they resemble lizard scales. Then the avalanches begin, earth and boulders surging forward like a waterfall, a tumultuous cauldron which soon melds into what looks more like asteroids in the sky until slowly the film’s title appears from out of the clouds. Wow.
Next come haunting images of the Sicilian town of Poggioreale, destroyed by an earthquake in 1968 and now abandoned to the elements. Architecton – the word comes via Tolstoy from ancient Greek, to convey the sense of the architect of the universe – has the same fascination with ruins that long inspired philosophers and Romantic poets. For Denis Diderot ruins reinforce our fragile place in the general scheme of things: “Everything dissolves, everything perishes, everything passes, only time goes on. What is my existence compared to crumbling stone?” Ruins are humbling, reminding us of glories from the past such as the broken fluted columns and intricately carved architraves of ancient sites (Kossokovsky doesn’t mention that many of the erect pillars and seemingly intact arches are the result of partial restorations). But this is true only for the antique: modern ruins like the illegal ugly cement structures that dot Italy’s south have no such charm, resisting earlier structures’ ability to evocatively crumble into their landscapes, and there’s no gainsaying the fact that such brutalist monstrosities are not just ugly but infect their surroundings with ugliness.
Woven amongst these grandiose visions are scenes of Italian architect Michele De Lucchi overseeing the installation of a rock circle in his garden, whose center he plans to leave untouched, allowing nature to reconquer at least this small plot. It’s to be a sign of the ideal cohabitation between mankind and nature, within the circle’s eternal form. De Lucchi is Kossakovky’s intellectual companion, his master along the lines of the ancient Greek philosophers, a practitioner wrestling with the legacy of contemporary construction on both the environment and the human psyche. We need to create such circles in every city, he says, to allow people to see how untouched nature and beauty ennobles us.
The message is strong, though one is reminded of how King Charles III, when Prince of Wales, was ridiculed for championing classically inspired beauty in contemporary architecture. Kossakovsky’s setting of all these disparate elements alongside each other is powerful and persuasive to a degree, yet not everything fits quite as neatly as he’d like: yes the devastating earthquakes in south-eastern Turkey were made far worse because contractors didn’t build to code, but how exactly does this align with the man-made destruction in Ukraine? We should indeed marvel at the enormous block of stone partly quarried out in ancient times for use in building Baalbek, but let’s not forget that all that remains standing of the temple to Jupiter, the largest in the Roman world, are six columns. Earthquakes and pillaging have taken their toll there too.
Despite the documentary’s stunning visual quality, its hard-lined digital imagery is akin to what Kossakovsky complains about regarding cement: it’s not living, it doesn’t breath, not in the way that celluloid does, or to continue the building theme, marble, wood or brick. People need to be taught about the tactile warmth of stone (and film) versus steel and cement, they need to experience it with their eyes and sense of touch, seeing it in conjunction with their environment in a way that fosters beauty that lasts. Not forever – nothing lasts forever – but perhaps long enough to make an evocative ruin.
Director, screenplay, editing: Victor Kossakovsky
With: Michele De Lucchi, Abdul Nabi Al-Afi, Victor Kossakovsky
Producers: Heino Deckert
Co-producers: Clara Vuillermoz, Estelle Robin You, Charlotte Hailstone
Executive producers: Ben Cotner, Emily Osborne, Adriana Banta, Frank Lehmann, Nick Shumaker
Cinematography: Ben Bernhard
Music: Evgueni Galperine
Sound: Alexander Dudarev
Production companies: Ma.ja.de. Filmproduktions GmbH (Germany), Point du Jour (France), Les Films du Balibari (France), ZDF in collaboration with ARTE (Germany), in association with Hailstone Films
World sales: The Match Factory
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (International competition)
In Italian, English
97 minutes
