Rocks. Ignore the poster, it's mostly about rocks
dir: Viktor Kossakovsky
2024
You won’t usually hear me praising documentaries, mostly because when they’re really good I find them so depressing I can’t even write about them, and when they’re bad I don’t want to bring any additional notice to them, however meagre it might be.
A24, also, isn’t that well known for snapping up and releasing docos, so that A24 being involved was the first thing that intrigued me about this. Plus the name. It sounds like some villain out of ages past, or a Transformers movie.
In Greek it just means “architect”, which I guess shouldn’t be surprising because it’s right there in the name, but here I think, given the subject matter, it’s meant to mean more, as in, what are we making of this world?
It’s about cement, but you’re not going to know that until way, way into the film, almost towards the end. Until you get there, you’re going to think maybe it’s about the destruction of war (specifically the destruction wrought by that pigfucker Vladimir Putin in Ukraine), or the patient destruction that comes with time, as we see so much footage of ancient structures, of places where all that remains are the arches above entrances or doorways.
And rocks, lots of rocks, how they are wrenched from the earth, how they are broken down to powder.
And there’s some old Italian guy having a stone circle laid down in his back yard. There’s a lot of that footage. The old guy mostly stands around as two actual workers dig up the soil and lay in the stones that make up the circle. It starts raining, and then later it’s snowing. The two chaps keep working away until it’s done.
Seems a bit unfair, like maybe they could have waited a day or two so it wasn’t so cold, but they’re diligent guys, so good luck to them.
Our thoughts don’t turn to the millions of hands that similarly built all these massive works over the last however thousands of years, but we spend so much time looking at these works; both the ones that endure and the ones that don’t. Ancient works that seem like they’re going to last thousands more years, and Soviet-era government housing destroyed by Putin’s random civilian-population terrorising indiscriminate bombing. Some of those apartments look like they should have been destroyed, but saying that sounds like I’m praising a pigfucking dictator, and I’d never do that.
Other footage shows similar-looking apartment blocks in Turkey having been destroyed by earthquake, and how the destruction leaves endless piles of rubble that needs to be cleared via bulldozer before something can be built in its place. And yet what of all that rubble?
Drive it off a cliff and leave it there. The implicit critique, which is only made explicit right at the end, is how useless these building materials are, how lifeless. Concrete is a dead, arid thing. To make it we strip the earth, literally vivisect it with open cut mining, sloughing off millions of tonnes of rock at a time with explosives, such that the rock itself seems, in this extraordinary footage, drone and otherwise, flows like water, rivers of the stuff, cascading in directions that seem to defy gravity.
In another sequence, that I would almost call cheeky, the rocks are wetted and made to dance, there’s no other word for it. The sombre soundtrack by Evgueni Galperine shifts significantly into a techno-ish beat, and it’s impossible to see this sequence without thinking of people dancing at a rave, at least for me.
To call that sequence hypnotic would incorrectly imply the rest of the flick doesn’t have similar pacing: much of the flick is so hypnotic it made me pass out a number of times. I confess to having watched it too late at night one fair evening, so I had to restart the next day, watch it again with a more alert mindset. Slowly panning over any set or scene, over any image, when it’s slow enough, feels like I’ve been shot by one of those tranquiliser darts they use on large beasts at the zoo or on the Serengeti. It’s one of the reasons why I find the legendary films of legendary director Andrei Tarkovsky so hard to watch, because that slow panning stuff is like heroin to me.
This isn’t my not so subtle way of implying this film is boring, like a lot of documentaries, in most people’s minds. I found the film plenty interesting, plenty intriguing. Visually it’s pretty stunning, even when you’re just looking at rocks. Honest to god, rocks. It’s just that I haven’t walked away from the experience with that much, in that, even getting the premise: that cement is a terrible, inert material that we create and slather over this fair planet, I don’t have that much of a takeaway, as in, well, what am I meant to do with this knowledge? I already knew we were doing untold squillions of awful things to the planet, so what now?
Pioneer better building materials, maybe, looking to the past for inspiration, and looking forward to a time when these things that we build as refuge and as a monument to ourselves, however long they last, can be broken down and reused in meaningful ways?
Yeah, well, I’ll get right on that.
Perhaps as much inspiration is meant to come from watching the construction of that stone circle, and recalling the simple scene where a pencil draws a circle on a piece of paper, and inscribes, almost as sigils, that we “Leave it Be”, that we still look to what we can conserve and preserve of this world. The scenes where mountains are flayed open and eviscerated don’t really increase one’s appreciation of the mining industry or its hallowed works, so maybe there will be a time when saying we just obviously shouldn’t be doing that anymore won’t seem controversial.
The old Italian guy does call it his “magic circle”, at some point, whether the one on paper or the one in his back yard. And who is the crazy Italian guy who I keep referring to, why is he important to this documentary or to the world? Well, he’s Michele de Lucchi, who was a legendary architect and designer back in the day, who laments the construction of yet another ugly box in Milan, and laments our dependence on this ugly substance. In the film’s epilogue he explicitly states that it’s the aridity of cement that makes it so useless in the long term; its deadness is what offends him. His central tenet and parting words is that what we design and build changes people’s behaviours.
That this planet has a problem because our species overconsumes and overproduces is nothing new in the realms of documentaries. Half of this entire genre is just how terrible humans are to each other and the world, and the other half is how great nature, plants and animals are, and how they’re all at threat because of pesky humans. A new genre is needed, where the movies tell us accurately what things we can do to change everything about how we do things, that transcend the renewables good / fossil fuels bad binary. Building more concrete and steel buildings and laying some token greenery on one of the walls as a symbolic gesture isn’t going to cut it. I suspect de Lucchi’s statements really are probably aimed not at us, the mouth-breathing, t-shirt wearing masses; they’re probably intended for people at the upper echelons of who makes what and who decides what to make and how to make it.
Maybe it’s a plaintive cry, maybe it’s just a salty old man’s lament. Either way, I enjoyed spending a bit of time with this old Italian lunatic, and with all this footage Kossakovsky filmed across Europe and the Middle East. There is an argument being made here, it’s not completely inscrutable, but there is also just the pleasure derived from the moving image (and the ominous, often overwhelming soundtrack).
It’s intriguing, but it’s hardly a call to arms. Maybe it’s a call to stand down.
7 times I will make no more concrete forever out of 10
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“Architecture is just a way to think about how we live.” - Architecton
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