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Viktor Kossakovsky’s 2024 Architecton

Architecton

Architecton

Architecton, Germany, France, United States 2024. Directed and written by Viktor Kossakovsky.

Metropol Phantom Theater, Row 1, Seat 3.

Viktor Kossakovsky’s documentary movie Architecton is strong on hi-res slow-motion drone footage that follows the path of stones from excavations at quarries to stone-built structures, and juxtaposes this journey with the fate of residential highrises built with concrete that, after damage from earthquakes, bombs, or old age, are torn down and sent to landfills. But there’s not much behind it dramatically, sociologically, or philosophically.

Way too much time is spent on an Italian architect supervising two stone masons build a “magic” stone circle in his garden that “no human should enter ever after,” topped by conversations with the movie’s director that indulge in stone vs. concrete platitudes like “concrete doesn’t breathe” and decry, in stark apples-and-oranges fashion, that stone temples built by religious cults stand for “thousands of years” while residential concrete highrises in Milan get “torn down in forty.” (Not to mention the fact that concrete was well in use in classical antiquity already.) And, beyond the well-known quote that “concrete is the second-most-used substance in the world after water,” the movie doesn’t bother telling how concrete comes about.

What the movie doesn’t show, or is blissfully oblivious of, are contemporary developments to put concrete to better use, from concrete recycling to the repurposing of concrete structures in Afrofuturism, or Singapore’s enormous Solarpunk-ish public residential highrise structures together with the city planners’ efforts at maintaining aesthetic continuity when well-loved highrises need to be torn down and rebuilt.

Then, there are parts that are nice to look at but do belong in different movies, like the felling of a huge tree in an Austrian winter landscape, or the introductory footage that shows war-damaged Ukrainian buildings—absolutely impressive in every respect, but not fitting at all the general theme of decline where concrete takes over from stone.

Yet, the cinematography is great, and Galperine’s music is fantastic. Busel’s sound design is excellent too. Documentaries, with rare exceptions, suffer from the general impossibility of recording the natural sounds that go with the natural phenomena they document, which makes the use of Foley necessary and acceptable. But that also often introduces fiction through dramatization into these documentaries of which the audience is rarely aware. Here, the sound design is always restrained and appropriate and never strays into the realm of dramatization and fiction.

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