Get the latest gossip
‘Architecton’ Review: Victor Kossakovsky’s Mesmerizing Documentary on What We Take From the Earth to Build Upon It
Following 'Gunda' and 'Aquarela,' Victor Kossakovsky's 'Architecton' is a ravishing examination of the tension between human nature and nature itself.
Whether gazing in rapt widescreen across wondrous ancient structures, ruined recent cityscapes or the oceanic shift and shake of a stone quarry in action, this is blatantly dazzling, epic-scale filmmaking that nonetheless invites viewers to consider the implications of our awe. In pointed contrast, we cut to the ancient ruins of Baalbek in Lebanon, where the architect gazes upon a pair of stone megaliths so vast, so positively uncanny in their scale and the precision of their shaping, that they hardly seem man-made, as if lowered on the land by a divine entity for our eternal astonishment. The film’s most hypnotic sequences, luxuriating over several minutes of screen time, observe in painstaking slow-motion the fall and flow of stone following calculated explosions, revealed — via Kossakovsky’s own crisp, elegant cuts — in ever wider shot until the mineral tumble takes on the appearance of water in frothy, turbulent motion.
Or read this on Variety
