JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Some documentaries are filled with talking heads who explain things. Others show evidence and lay out an argument. But the new movie “Architecton” takes a different approach. It is a nearly wordless meditation on stone and concrete, the building blocks of civilization. Critic Bob Mondello found it powerful, often for what it doesn’t say.
BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: At one point, falling stone fills the screen to a rumble like thunder.
(SOUNDBITE OF STONES RUMBLING)
MONDELLO: Large chunks fracture and shatter as they crash against each other. Smaller ones crumble into dust, and more and more keep coming. It’s a torrent of stone that behaves almost like a frothing waterfall – a cascading, frothing granitefall (ph), let’s say – unexplained for the moment, but in this moment, mesmerizing. Russian director Victor Kossakovsky’s films always traffic in gorgeous images, and “Architecton” uses them to offer a dazzling, epically cinematic argument.
Who needs words when you have breath-catching shots of the deep, even cuts in a terraced quarry that’s claimed an entire mountainside? The terraces catch sunlight and shadow in patterns that have a certain majesty, even as they contrast with the age-old geologic striations of the surrounding mountain range. A nearby pine tree, sheathed in freshly fallen snow, viewed from directly above, glitters in the sunlight like a giant snowflake. Then you see it move and realize it’s about to crash to the earth, felled by a chainsaw you didn’t hear because composer Evgueni Galperine’s score had you transfixed.
(SOUNDBITE OF TREE CRASHING TO THE GROUND)
MONDELLO: Elsewhere, stones seem to dance to a club beat as they skitter and bounce on a conveyor belt.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MONDELLO: And everywhere there are reminders that man-made creations have a lifespan of years, not eons. The filmmaker provides soaring drone shots of ancient Roman columns standing proudly above exquisite rubble left by a civilization that built with stone; taller-but-less-impressive modern structures built just decades ago, not of stone, but of concrete, shattered by bombs in Ukraine or by earthquakes in Turkey. Italian architect Michele De Lucchi is our guide to all this, wheezing as he examines an ancient Roman monolith the size of a freight train car.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, “ARCHITECTON”)
MICHELE DE LUCCHI: (Inaudible).
MONDELLO: It was cut but never moved from a quarry in Lebanon, intended for something, but in the end, pointless, a scar left for all to see. The film’s underlying message is that what the Earth has endured as man has used and abused it is unsustainable. At one point, De Lucchi confesses to feeling remorse at having helped insert an unremarkable concrete structure into Milan’s downtown. In a sort of self-imposed penance, he employs two stone workers to create a simple stone circle, perhaps 30 feet across, in the yard of his house.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, “ARCHITECTON”)
DE LUCCHI: (Speaking Italian).
MONDELLO: A magic circle, he says, so simple it almost doesn’t qualify as architecture, but he’s designed it to be a negative space, a human-free area that will be allowed to return to nature.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, “ARCHITECTON”)
DE LUCCHI: (Speaking Italian).
MONDELLO: To make a circle like that, he says to the workers, is simply useless.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, “ARCHITECTON”)
DE LUCCHI: (Speaking Italian).
MONDELLO: It has no practicality. Still, the work has been painstaking and precise. And in the context of all we’ve seen by the end of “Architecton,” it seems in some elemental way essential.
I’m Bob Mondello.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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