‘Architecton’ Review: From the Director of ‘Gunda,’ a Visually Mesmerizing Meditation on the Bedrock of Existence

At a time when movies are made to be watched on smaller and smaller screens, one director whose work still demands to be seen on the biggest screen possible is Victor Kossakovsky.

The Russian auteur has been roving the planet for two decades now, employing state-of-the-art equipment and the best cameramen around to capture life on Earth — though not in the way David Attenborough once envisioned it. His documentaries are pure visual tone poems or essays, using little commentary and tons of breathtaking imagery to capture the world we live in, whether it’s the water we drink (Aquarela), the animals we breed and consume (Gunda) or the far-flung locations we sometimes inhabit (Vivan las Antipodas!). You don’t watch a Kossakovsky movie as much as you take it in with eyes wide open, immersing yourself in images and associations that present everyday phenomena in a whole new way.

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The director’s latest work, Architecton, is more about death than life, capturing the natural and manmade structures formed out of the planet’s bedrock and manipulated over time, destroyed quickly or gradually and then built anew. It’s a cycle — or a circle, to take one of the film’s visual metaphors — that begins somewhere in the dusty mountains of the Middle East, then ends in the catastrophic remains of Ukrainian cities torn apart by the ongoing war with Russia. At the heart of all of our structures lies the Earth itself, cut up into pieces mined from vast quarries, broken down into smaller pieces, transported, assembled and eventually, demolished. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust — in the end we’re all just a pile of rocks.

These are a few of the ideas that come to mind when sitting through Kossakovsky’s latest, whose title, per the press notes, is taken from a term that early 20th century avant-gardist Kazimir Malevitch employed in his theories about art. It was also a word that Tolstoy used toward the end of War and Peace, meant to describe the powerful will of God.

Indeed, there’s something very godlike about a movie that presents our world on such a daunting scale, revealing the magnitude of what we’ve been able to build since ancient times, and what we are now wrecking in ours. The opening sequence soars above the ruins of a shattered city — there are no titles, so it’s unclear whether we’re in Ukraine or parts of Turkey destroyed by last year’s earthquake — and continues to soar for a long time, backed by film composer Evgueni Galperine’s transfixing score.

If there were ever an Oscar handed out for drone photography, Architecton would win it hands down this year. Working with regular DP Ben Bernhard (who also shot the excellent All That Breathes), Kossakovsky captures structures in ways never before seen. In one jaw-dropping sequence, he hovers close when the wall of a quarry suddenly explodes in slow-motion, the granite transforming into thousands of organic-like mutations, until the camera retreats far away for a bird’s eye view that puts it all into perspective.

Beyond the visual through-line, consisting of minerals of all shapes and sizes, that traverses the movie, a character of sorts appears in the persona of Italian architect Michele de Lucchi. We see him visiting a colossal ancient stone monolith in Lebanon, and, when back at home, employing a pair of workers to piece together a simple circular rock formation in his own backyard. De Lucchi never narrates events, but he does serve as a sort of guide to what we’re witnessing. Only at the end of the film does he speak with the director in some length, lamenting about the sorry state of contemporary architecture, especially the use of concrete, and claiming that “we have to find a new idea of beauty.”

If beauty is still a quandary for modern architects, when it comes to filmmakers, Kossakovsky has managed to create his own unique form of it. At a time when most documentaries, especially those made for streaming services, consist of little to no visual invention, the director has invented and finessed a cinematic language that says more about the world we live in than all the talking heads in all the Netflix docs combined.

We don’t always know what, exactly, we’re watching in Architecton, but that doesn’t really matter. What matters is how the movie offers us a new way of seeing — not only seeing our planet of stone and cement, of rocks and ruins, but seeing movies in general.