Here are J. M. W. Turner's The Fall of an Avalanche in the Grisons (1810) and an explosive rock fall in Victor Kossakovsky's new essay film Architecton. I watched the latter from the safety of my cinema seat, immersed in the noise and right up close to the violence of rocks crashing down and smashing into themselves. As Burke said of the Sublime, where you are not at risk of destruction, such experiences produce 'a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquility tinged with terror; which, as it belongs to self-preservation, is one of the strongest of all the passions.' Landscape drone footage may now be a cliché in movies, but I did feel watching this that the technology has given us a new way of experiencing delightful horror.
Architecton is good on the life cycle of stone, from quarrying, to building to destruction, but its structure is confusing - you only really understand where in the world the rockfall happened towards the end. A prologue shot in Ukraine feels a bit tacked on. Personally I didn’t care for the music or some of the black and white footage. However, I did warm to the film's central figure, an amiable old Italian architect-designer called Michele De Lucchi. He wanders round Baalbek's Roman ruins, admiring the lovely old stone (no ugly concrete) and marveling at how they cut it with such precision. Back at his idyllic-looking family home in Italy, we see him direct two workmen to build a circular stone garden feature. You worry he is going to catch pneumonia standing out in the snow while it takes shape, although maybe this inclement day was chosen by the director. The result is reminiscent of a Richard Long circle and it becomes clear he aims to let the interior grow naturally, like herman de vries's meadow. In Peter Bradshaw's review he says that despite some faults, the film 'is so striking, especially on the big screen, almost itself a kind of land art.'
