Documentary Releases: Architecton (2025) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of A24

Early on in Viktor Kossakovsky’s Architecton, the new film being released by A24 from the Russian documentary filmmaking equivalent of Ron Fricke or Godfrey Reggio often operating in wordless sensory experiences about water ala Aquarela or livestock in Gunda, Kossakovsky’s top of the line drone cameras drift through bombed out decimated buildings and complexes in Ukraine in a mournful quietly outraged opening prologue.  At one point the camera pulls back to reveal an enlarged banner reading ‘kick Russia out of the UN’ next to apartment buildings and playgrounds in ruin.  

As Russian-French avant-garde composer Evgueni Galperine’s atonal score flares up and swells into an understated conflagration compounded with Aleksandr Dudarev’s Dolby Atmos sound rendering, the Ukraine prologue in the Russian director’s film casts both a heavy pall over the otherwise cyclical proceedings of architecture and rock moving about or breaking apart implying manmade warfare is another form of Anthropocene and newly erected infrastructures teeming with life are built on the backs and shoulders of death.

 
Soon the meditative ethereal mostly wordless documentary experience save for some occasional recurring exchanges with Italian architect Michele De Lucchi moves into the construction of a circle of stone in his garden.  Throughout, the film intercuts in between mountains of stone, the regard for a megalith in Lebanon and Earthquake ravaged cities in Turkey.  Gradually the film shot frequently in ultra-high speed watches the unfolding and dancing of rock either exploding, tumbling downward or being ran through a conveyer belt for recycling.  

In between the elongated slow pans across landscapes manmade and natural, Kossakovsky’s camera cuts through black-and-white high-contrast montages of abandoned buildings and structures with the faintest glimmer of life running through it like a lone dog climbing up stairwells of ruins.  Also sprinkled throughout are moments with artist Nick Steur who creates brutalist stone structures often on tripods amid concrete ruins or rocks and preservationist Abdul Nabi al-Afi working in the Baalbek quarry in Lebanon, creating a kind of pure freeform meditation on not only concrete’s physical connection to our past but to our sustainability as a species.

 
Near the film’s end, Kossakovsky himself appears onscreen in soft conversation with Michele De Lucchi ruminating on the meaning of architecture and the role it undeniably plays in Anthropocene.  Whereas Aquarela and Gunda are open to interpretation and pure at heart, Architecton expresses concern about our connection to concrete and whether or not we’re devouring whatever natural resources we have left or if we’re merely recycling them into something new made from old parts.  As a video installation piece of sorts, Architecton is ethereal and vast while also being quietly mournful about the intrinsically destructive nature of creation.  As a wordless musical montage of sorts, it reminds very strongly of Aphex Twin’s cosmic double-album Selected Ambient Works Vol. II where the surface of our planet begins to feel increasingly alien.  

As a Kossakovsky film, it poses a number of fundamental philosophical questions while also being a quietly funereal regard for the transformative nature of architecture reshaping the face of our planet either naturally or unnaturally.  If Aquarela saw Earth as a planet of water, Architecton is the other half made of rock whose pillars and towers though beautiful and spectacular hint at entire generations of life and death buried beneath and between the boulders and stones.  At once a meditation on civilization and man’s abilities to create and destroy in equal measure.

--Andrew Kotwicki