Architecton

 Pythagoras said:  "A stone is frozen music."  In Architectron (2024), a grave and austere film symphony, stone is only rarely frozen -- rather, it flows and surges with oceanic impulses.  We see enormous landslides shot in close-up as a Brownian motion of agitated rock ovals and cubes carried in a slurry of muddy earth.  Explosions dislodge whole hillsides that come toppling down.  Gravel lunges and surges on conveyor belts and ore is melted into fiery red magma.  Heaps of stone stir and leap with mysterious animate energy.  And, everywhere, the film documents the ephemeral aspect of stone used in human buildings -- we see the Brutalist shells of vast, enigmatic structures, ripped asunder, rectangular windows in their domes casting white squares of light into the concrete rubble fallen from walls and roofs.  Apartment blocks in Ukraine are ripped open, exposing rooms like niches filled with decaying relics.  A drone lazes through a vast gap in a wall of highrises where an enormous billboard announces that the UN has denounced the fighting in Ukraine. In the distance, we seen gilded onion-domes of churches, some of them possibly damaged.  Miles and miles of residential highrises have been ripped open and are spilling their contents into lanes full of mountainous piles of debris -- this seems to be the aftermath of the earthquake in Turkey.  Some disheveled palms stand along the desolate boulevards where big, insectoid loaders and excavators are disemboweling the concrete escarpments.  On hill tops. vast drum-like pillars, all dissected into sections lie strewn in grassy meadows or are piled together like colossal, sinister gears.  On a mountain, ruins stretch out to the horizon, marked here and there by squashed brick arches -- it's like the end of an empire imagined by Thomas Cole.  

Ostensibly, the Kossokovsky's documentary seems to have something to do with the most mundane of all subjects:  concrete and building materials made from stone.  The film has a complex and pulsing orchestral score -- it's like Stravinsky's ballet music with a throbbing New Age impetus.  But there are almost no words and human beings either are absent from most shots or dwarfed by massive cubist ranges of stone and concrete.  (The mighty avalanches and landslides that punctuate the film would be lethal to mere flesh.)  The movie begins with a prologue showing the destruction of residential condominiums in Ukraine.  The film's long middle section commences with an old man with a rabbinical beard scrambling around a vast quarry full of pinkish monoliths, one of which is the size of several locomotives.  (This turns out to be the quarry at Baalbek -- although the place is never identified in the film -- the site of a vast block that was cut for some Roman or Egyptian building project but never hauled from its native quarry.)  In this quarry, incongruously, we hear faint city noises, traffic honking, and the like -- toward the end of the movie, a  reverse shot shows that this jumble of huge stones and debris occupies a crater right next to a busy street and some raw-looking edifices where people live.  The building blocks from which the movie is made and to which the picture reverts at intervals are a vast quarry, hollowed into the side of a mountain, dozens and dozens of terraces stacked atop one another like a ladder tilted against the peak, Greek and Roman ruins, a mountaintop covered in labyrinthine cells and chambers, all roofless, interspersed with brick arches, a machine pouring concrete like white frosting on a cake, the old man with the rabbinical beard constructing a circle of stones inset into his lawn (he and his two workers select the stones and stack them in a groove cut into the sod), a man who perches stones on top of one another in impossible seeming stacks, each rock precisely balanced on the rock below it, mighty explosions and landslides, tidal waves of rock rolling and falling and careening down hillsides, the ruins of modern residential high rises wrecked by war or earthquake, enormous earthmoving machines rooting around in piles of rubble, loading huge trucks that, then, travel in convoy to a canyon on the edge of the hollowed-out quarry mountain -- the robotic-looking machines dump the rubble into the canyon from which plumes and towering blossoms of dust rise.  The film's rhythm is that of landslide, repose, landslide, repose -- that is, alternating sequences of destruction and construction.  The old man completes his stone circle in a snowstorm.  He hopes that his horses and his dog will enter the circle when it is complete.  An aerial shot near the the end of the movie shows the architect's black labrador hunkered down at the center of the circle in the falling rain.  I saw this movie on a big screen -- it is mindlessly, colossally spectacular; the picture is 85 minutes long and, also, extremely tedious.  After the fourth or fifth, landslide or quarry explosion, you begin to wonder:  what's the point of this?  In the Russian manner, Kossokovsky spiritualizes brute matter -- he makes concrete and raw stone into soul-stuff.  Everything that seems solid, also flows, metamorphoses:  What we have stacked-up, inevitably, falls to the earth.

At the end of the movie, in an epilogue, we see Kossokovsky talking to the old man, apparently, a celebrated Italian architect.  The old man is seated by his stone circle.  The grass and weeds in the circle are tall but two robot-mowers are tirelessly grazing on the lawn around the circle -- a strange effect.  From this angle, we can see that the architect's elegant baroque villa is on a hillside near a teeming city.  The architect asks rhetorically why everything that we build is so ugly.  He admits he has just erected a bland, utilitarian skyscraper in Milan that is hideous and says, almost in tears, that he is ashamed of himself.  The old man claims that the epidemic of ugliness in architecture is due to the ubiquity of concrete, a building substance that he denounces.  But this epilogue falsifies the imagery of the movie.  The circle seems to clearly embody the rhythm of destruction and creation that characterize the film -- everything in the end becomes ruin, mere insensate stone. The concrete shown in the movie is just as spectacular as the heaps of hewn and carved stones at the ancient sites.  How is the concrete inferior to the massive cut obelisk sprawled on the living stone in the Baalbek quarry?  And all of the classical-era buildings are fallen, lying in graceful heaps of rounded pillars in the golden-rod.  Concrete is just as susceptible to earthquake and war as stone.  Earthquake and war reduce both stone and concrete to dust and debris.  In fact, Kossokovsky's final image shows some kind of colossal concrete maze -- the scenes provide no sense of scale:  mighty grooves make canyons between buttes of white concrete -- this cement landscape is on the scale of the other great vistas in the movie:  we see foggy mountains, hillsides that are three-thousand feet high hacked into stacked terraces, a coal train crossing an ocean it seems on a diaphanous skein of track in the middle of the waters -- both stone and concrete are subject to the pulse of violent destruction and creation.  

Of course, the viewer's impulse is to research the movie to try to figure out the location of the incredibly spectacular landscapes.  This sort of research seemingly defeats the purpose because if the director wanted you to identify these glacial, spiritual landscapes with real places, he would have provided this information.  Everything presented in the movie is an appearance that seems unreal, ghostly, a fantasy of stacked stone falling apart and concrete rupturing into black fissures.  The old man has a discussion with a quarry worker at Baalbek -- the worker, also an old man, has spent his life "cleaning" the quarry.  It's a Sisyphean endless task and we see the man pitching rocks into a wheelbarrow and, then, laboriously pushing the wheelbarrow up steep faces of stone.  (What is he doing?)  It's irritating that the filmmaker so steadfastly refuses to provide any information about what we are seeing.  From the director's perspective, the spectacle is Platonic -- an incursion into an ideal world of forms embodying creation and destruction, the pulse of spirit embodied in matter.

You have to be in a certain mood to tolerate a film like this.  Probably, for most people, watching the film's spectacular trailer would be sufficient.

(The concrete labyrinth at the end of the film is an installation art work in Sicily called Grande Creta -- the "great crack".  The work is by Alberto Burri and located on the site of a hilltown called Gibellina that was destroyed in an earthquake.  Burri's work mimics the streets and alleys of the lost town and was made between 1984 and 2015.  Some critics regard Achitecton as part of a triptych comprised by Kossovosky's earlier Aquarela (about water) and Gunda (about pigs).  The mountain sculpted into innumerable terraces is in Austria; Baalbek is in Lebanon.)