Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Russian documentarist Victor Kossakovsky has worked on the very largest scales, and some of the smallest. In his intimate mode, he has made a film studying the view from the window of his flat, while 2020’s extraordinary Gunda offered a close-up portrait of a sow and her litter. At the other end of the spectrum was Aquarela (2018), a quasi-symphonic musing on the various manifestations of water on our planet. Now in similarly maximalist mode comes Architecton, a largely wordless study of stone. This imagistic essay muses on the problem of man-made structures now and through history, and the urgency of rethinking the art of building when there is only so much natural material left to exploit.Architecton begins by contemplating destruction, using drone photography to provide sweeping vistas of buildings shelled by Russia in Ukraine or destroyed during the Turkish earthquakes of 2023. Then we contemplate the sheer power of substance, in the form of a colossal stone block in the ruins of Baalbek in Lebanon — a mass that one can barely imagine human machineries ever having manipulated. The film then becomes a rhapsody to pure materiality, as the camera glides over stone surfaces and contemplates endless slow cascades of rock down the slopes of a quarry, and boulders pulverised in the grinding machineries of a gravel crusher. Through the remarkable clarity of Ben Bernhard’s photography — so precise that at one point, your attention is caught by a tiny ant scuttling along a slab of masonry — gazing at the real becomes akin to a hallucinatory science-fiction experience. Sequences in black and white show an abandoned town reclaimed by nature, its surfaces and surrounding vegetation bleached out like bone or chalk.Interludes in a more everyday register show Italian architect Michele De Lucchi — himself resembling a visitor from antiquity, bearded like an Attic sage — as he supervises the laying of a circle of stones in his garden. In the film’s epilogue, he and Kossakovsky contemplate the problem of architecture now and in the future. How can we build, De Lucchi asks, with material that is not fated to become garbage? What does it mean that humanity once made structures that endured a thousand years but now makes them to last only decades? The architect ruefully confesses his guilt at working on a building to be made from concrete, a material that he regards as “arid”. Indeed, it is through the manufacture of concrete that we have been watching mountains reduced gradually to rubble and dust.On one level, Architecton is a semi-abstract reverie on a very material topic; with its often ceremonial-sounding music by Evgueni Galperine, it somewhat recalls Godfrey Reggio’s much-loved “state of humanity” documentary Koyaanisqatsi. Certainly there is a slight flavour of the grandiosely sententious — and the opening images of destruction could be accused of aestheticising catastrophe. But there is also a serious philosophical and environmental inquiry at work here, regarding our future and the urgent need to reinvent the way we make the spaces we inhabit.★★★★☆In UK cinemas from January 10
