Something to watch tonight: Monday 4 August

Architecton (Kossakovsky, 2024)

A couple of Fridays ago I reviewed this documentary on RNZ Nights and, in the rush of At the Movies episodes since then, failed to bring it to your attention here.

As Emile D. pointed out, Architecton is a film that’s right up my alley. Architecture and design? Tick. Meditative visuals? Tick. No immediately apparent narrative but instead a manifesto that slowly reveals itself? Big Tick.

Architecton is about our built environment but, more essentially, about the materials we use to construct it. Director Victor Kossakovsky collaborated with Italian architect Michele De Lucchi on this poetic deconstruction of construction, if you will. Or maybe it’s the other way around, as several of the scenes are powerful drone sequences of buildings in disarray, shedding their skins as a result of earthquake (Turkey) or war (Ukraine).

Other scenes take us to buildings that have been abandoned by age – no longer fit for purpose, they have become shells – or hypnotic shots of stone being quarried. Explosions followed by rubble flowing like liquid downhill.

Between scenes, we meet De Lucchi, building a stone circle in his garden in the snow, his helpers shivering as he directs them towards appropriate rocks. Stone is important to the film, as we also visit the two thousand-year-old Baalbek ruins in Lebanon and De Lucchi finally asks his key question – why do we insist on building in concrete which is so environmentally toxic, requires so much energy to produce, is so difficult to recycle and lasts only a few decades?

Architecton reminded me of classic films about the modern world like Koyaanisqatsi, but we don’t have the benefit here of a Philip Glass score. I was riveted nonetheless.

Editor’s note

Once again, Substack has found a way to make me investigate moving this newsletter to another platform. That annoys me no end because a) I have encountered no Nazis here and feel like the extent of my Substack experience is you lovely people and the other newsletters that I subscribe to, and b) it’s the best and easiest content management system I have experienced. When Substack said they wanted to build a platform that was a pleasure to write with, I feel they succeeded.

But they are in the process of screwing the pooch, reputationally-speaking, and I think they are getting in the way.

Ideally, I would have a system that was based in my old WordPress site and that kept the archive free for people to discover. That’s the legacy idea, and I’m frustrated that my work has ended up in so many different places, but WordPress doesn’t yet have an email plugin that matches the ease and reliability of Substack, nor is it easy to move paid subscriptions¹.

What I can do is start preparing for an eventual move by changing the URL of the newsletter from substack.funeralsandsnakes.net to newsletter.funeralsandsnakes.net, a change which Substack says can only be done once without losing everything and starting again. I’ll assess the risk of that and look to make the change in the next couple of weeks. Getting off the platform altogether will take longer.

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Where to watch Architecton