Stream It or Skip It?

Viktor Kossakovsky’s films are such that you want to call him a “documentary artist.” Architecton (now streaming on HBO Max) is his latest, a meditation on creation and destruction told via long, often static images of stone and concrete in natural and manmade contexts. You don’t watch it as much as let yourself be hypnotized by the images, then contemplate how they fit together once the credits roll. There’s no “plot,” very little dialogue and plenty of implied commentary on the state of the world – and the film is therefore only as challenging as you want it to be.

ARCHITECTON: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: The urge to figure out what, exactly, we’re looking at in Architecton is great. Drone footage, which comprises significant portions of this film, shows us an apartment building with a chunk smashed from the middle of it, and my initial inclination, perhaps insensitively, was to describe it as what might happen had Godzilla had lunged through the structure, although I more realistically assumed that it was the result of an act of war. The images eventually give us a hint that it’s a building in Ukraine, almost certainly bombed by Russian forces during the current, ongoing armed conflict. The film gives us plenty of time to mull over what it’s showing us, often toying with scale and perspective by showing us something that we perceive to be utterly massive, then slowly zooming out to show us the proper context in an image even more humbling than the first.

Kossakovsky does this quite often, whether it’s a manmade stone column silently sitting at a 30-degree angle in ancient ruins, rockslides in mountain ranges, nature slowly reclaiming decaying structures, explosions in quarries or excavators working to tear down what’s left of partially destroyed buildings. Some of the images are in color, others in highly saturated black-and-white. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if a closeup of undulating rocks – they resemble heaving ocean waves – is the result of industry or natural “disaster.” A line of empty dump trucks motors into the demolition zone, and in the other direction, a line of full trucks hauls wreckage out, to be dumped in a hole, where it closely resembles what we see in shots of rockslides. In, out. Life, death. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust. The cycles they are clawing.

We meet a kind of steward for the film, an Italian architect named Michele De Lucci. In what I believe is the yard outside his home, he directs two men as they dig a trench and break up stones to place in it, creating what De Lucci calls a “magic circle.” It’ll remain untouched, the grass unmowed, although the dogs and horses are allowed in it. He admits it has “no practicality.” Later, we see him subtly marveling at the aforementioned stone column, wondering aloud how ancient humans carved it, then attempting to bridge the language barrier as he talks with the man who’s worked for years maintaining the ruins’ tidiness. In the film’s epilogue, De Lucci converses with Kossakovsky himself, visiting the “magic circle,” the two men pondering notions of beauty, longevity, the stewardship of the planet. Today’s architecture is just tomorrow’s ruins.   

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Kossakovsky’s previous documentary, Gunda, offered similarly lengthy, static shots of farm animals (especially pigs). His work isn’t too far removed from Godfrey Reggio’s Qatsi doc series, or the way Werner Herzog studies cave paintings in Cave of Forgotten Dreams. 

Performance Worth Watching: Cinematographer Ben Bernhard assures that drone photography doesn’t always have to be cliched. His work in Architecton is magnificent, magisterial even, and contributes significantly to the poetry of the film.

Sex And Skin: None.

Our Take: Is it better to watch Architecton – a word meaning “master architect” – with some external context, or just soak in the imagery? Kossakovsky offers very little of the former and almost exclusively the latter, thus urging us to more intently notice sound (offering contextual cues), music (mostly unmelodic and provocative) and camera movement (lots of slow pans and zooms). The story is in the sensory language of the film. The director shot in wartorn Ukraine, at earthquake ruins in Turkey, at historical ruins in Lebanon and in other locales, but he never specifies what we’re looking at, thus prompting us to think bigger and broader, across millennia, just as the camera so often pulls back farther and farther until we feel tinier and tinier. Humanity is small, in stature and in thought, myopic in its consideration of what it can experience now rather than years ago and years ahead. 

Kossakovsky may peddle abstraction, but his intent is pretty clear, maybe even a mite heavy-handed in delivering assertions about environmental guardianship. Humanity’s place in the creation/destruction cycle is precarious, symbolized by shots of different-shaped stones balanced, seemingly magically, atop a tripod. The director adheres to the classical picture-worth-1,000-words cliche – in one shot, we watch one man fill a wheelbarrow with maybe a dozen stones, then labor mightily to push it up a slope, and the moment gives us just enough information to infer that this structure was a monumental achievement hundreds or thousands of years ago. Later, De Recchi will visit that spot and ponder how those people made this column, what technology they might’ve used; the film arguably doesn’t need this scene, because the architect verbalizes what’s already in our minds. But he then walks through the ruins, counting footsteps, and mutters, “This is what we call progress.” Whether that “progress” is ultimately good for us and the Earth is up to you to interpret.

Our Call: Architecton isn’t for the impatient. But it is grandly fascinating, an unusual documentary that pushes the boundaries of the form. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.