The new documentary Architecton is a jeremiad about the destruction and the self-destruction of the built environment. It is also an ode to ancient ways of building which are shown to keep structures standing.
The mostly-silent documentary by Victor Kossakovsky, opening in US theatres today (1 August), premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival last year. The director’s previous film, the much-praised Gunda (2020), was a tactile and tenderly intimate look at a sow and her piglets in Norway. One critic encapsulated the near-consensus opinion, calling it “an abrupt but much-needed wake-up call to humanity”.
In Architecton, Kossakovsky’s camera travels by drone to show us buildings ravaged by war in Ukraine—stripped of their walls to reveal interiors where families had lived. It is testimony gathered by drones on destruction brought by drones and constitutes a rare (albeit silent) condemnation by a Russian of his country’s devastation of its neighbour. Shifting to Turkey and to Baalbek in Lebanon, we visit the remains of modern structures after earthquakes levelled them, while ancient buildings in the landscape still stand.
Modern buildings are not only ugly, Kossakovsky told the audience when the film premiered in Berlin last year. They cannot stand up for long. Most are gone after 40 years, ruins that are cleared to make way for the next.
More of a cri de cœur than a systematic study, Kossakovsky’s tour can feel like a convulsive update to Koyaanisqatsi, the 1982 film by Godfrey Reggio, a whirlwind overview set to music by Phillip Glass of a world coming apart, which found a global audience at the time. Kossakovsky’s insistent score for his documentary comes from another Russian expatriate, the composer Evgueni Galperine.
A scene from Architecton (2024) Courtesy A24
Among builders, whom Kossakovsky faults categorically, the director finds a quiet prophet in the veteran architect and designer Michele di Lucchi, who takes time away from commercial projects to complete a modest grassy circle, lined with stone, a symbol of independence next to his house near Milan. As evidence of the project’s importance, he reserves entry for his dog.
Moments of reflection with Lucchi offer some respite from the film’s visions of destruction, yet those jarring sequences give Architecton its most explosive and oddly magical moments. Stone destined for concrete is blasted out of vast terraced hillsides, ominous as if they were open pits designed by Piranesi. After the blast the footage slows to watch the crushed stone hover in the air, swirling like waves in the ocean.
“The life of the rock, the last minute of the life of the rock when it’s been on a mountain and then becomes powder for cement,” Kossakovsky says, “this process from the mountain to become nothing, the moment when they crushed that stone—for me it’s painful to watch.”
In other scenes, when ruins of newly destroyed buildings are cleared, excavating vehicles pile in like vultures or praying mantises to seize and carry off the debris. The mechanised scavenging “creatures” seem suited to the work of a 21st-century Hieronymus Bosch. Kossakovsky’s cameraman Ben Bernhard observes their movements as if they were improbable poetic choreography.
Speaking from Trento, Italy, where he is shooting his next film, Kossakovsky discussed the proliferation of concrete, the wisdom of antiquity, animal rights and the humanity of Russian authors. The director, who got his hands dirty in Gunda with a litter of piglets and their mother, acknowledged that Architecton has elements of grandeur and horror.
Victor Kossakovsky, the director of Architecton (2024) Copyright Ivan Methfessel
“If I ask myself what I am filming. I’m filming horrible beauty all the time,” he says. “There are many wars on the planet. Unfortunately, my country is involved in them.” He adds: “Very specifically, Russia is guilty of a bigger war of humans against nature, and we fight in nature without even thinking it’s painful or wrong.”
He cites Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky as artists who felt a strong closeness to nature late in life. A native of St Petersburg (Leningrad at the time), Kossakovsky cites as a cinematic inspiration his countryman Alexander Sokurov, known for his deep but dour explorations of literary themes.
“I’m trying to film what people don’t pay attention to, I’m trying to find things which you cannot explain in words, [which] you can only feel if you watch it or see it,” he says. “Everybody knows this phrase from Dostoyevsky: ‘Beauty will save the world.’ He wrote something more important: ‘I don’t understand how you can pass a tree and not be happy just because you’ve seen it.’ The fact that you’re alive, and that you see the tree in front of you, it is already a huge privilege, it’s already happiness. With the connection to nature and beauty and to what people made before you, like a beautiful city, you will respect the city, you will not demolish it.”
- Architecton opens in US theatres on 1 August
