Revue Architecton – immersive and imposing meditation on concrete and stone | Movies

Victor Kossakovsky is the author of ambitious and immersive sensory documentaries, including 2018’s Aquarela, about the climate crisis, and 2020’s Gunda, about animal consciousness. Today he has created this monolithic, almost silent and vehement meditation on concrete and stone; the building materials that are so substantial and yet appear, in the numerous drone sequences of wrecked and destroyed buildings, to be equally temporary and almost fragile—their durability ultimately revealed in the almost insurmountable problem of how to clean it all up. , how to get rid of broken and unnecessary rubble. The mysterious plans of crushed or broken stones in the quarries show a violence in the harvest of the stone analogous to future destruction.

There are powerful images here, of broken buildings in Ukraine, ruined by war, and those in Turkey, destroyed by the earthquake of 2023; these are juxtaposed with the thoughts of the Italian architect Michele de Lucchi, who studied the ancient ruins of Baalbek in Lebanon and also created a stone circle for himself in his garden, which he bizarrely described as a “magic circle “.

In a final “epilogue” sequence, De Lucchi discusses with Kossakovsky what he sees as the mystery of the disposability and obsolescence of modern architecture, the construction of buildings that cannot last more than 40 or 50 years, so that the ancient world wanted buildings to last for thousands of years. Kossakovsky also wonders why we create ugly and boring buildings when we know how to create beautiful ones. Legitimate questions in mind, although De Lucchi might point out that in fact many or most buildings remain in place for much longer than 40 or 50 years and many Classical era buildings are in ruins or have disappeared. He might even wonder why we create ugly, boring films when we “know how” to create beautiful ones.

These are important questions, but I found something a little unclear and even slightly indulgent or redundant in the way the images are put together (accompanied by a loud musical score by Evgueni Galperine) without making the viewer understand what we look at and where. Yet the film is so gripping, especially on the big screen, almost a kind of land art itself.