Architecton

This is difficult to say, but Architecton is offensively long and boring. What kind of documentary hides its topic from its audience for most of its (98) minutes?

Well, I won’t hide things from you: For most of the movie you’ll watch rocks. No narration or screen-text will help you understand what you’re looking at, but hey, at least orchestral music will blast your eardrums.

Every so often you’ll hope to be saved by certain in-between scenes, during which an architect supervises the construction of a circle of—you guessed it, rocks—on his lawn. I wish I could tell you why he’s doing that.

Only in the last ten minutes or so do the moviemakers disclose the idea: Modern architecture, what with all its concrete, is short-term and harmful to humans and the planet, and ancient building techniques are not. Got it.

Nothing makes up for the fact that the movie hides this from us. Sure, a few of the scenes are truly gorgeous—I mean, have you ever seen rocks boil like water or coordinate like ants?—but they are not nearly frequent or brief or enlightening enough for this movie to treat us this way.

Maybe, just maybe, the moviemakers want us to feel the enormity of the scale at which we blast mountains to crumble their parts to pour concrete to raise buildings to later knock down buildings? But even if that’s right, we could’ve learned it in a more engaging and efficient way.

Dahomey

Forget the treasure hunt. Dahomey documents a treasure return, and wow does it satisfy the soul.

The backstory is that France is finally returning important cultural artifacts to the land from which France had stolen them during its colonial occupation (now considered Benin).

The main story is that people care about it. The return and the crime. And so the moviemakers very intelligently just set the camera down and let us watch as the people of Benin speak for themselves, one by one.

In differing languages and with differing ideas, the citizens take turns with the mic. This is thoughtful, emotional stuff.

It isn’t how all the people feel, of course—the people and the kingdoms from which these artifacts were stolen are long dead. But the moviemakers create space for them, too, by imagining how they might feel . . . by having an artifact awaken and speak to us . . .

This is a mildly outrageous act of imagination, to pretend that we can imagine how someone from the past feels about their culture being lost. But it stimulates our own imagination, and so, there’s something to it. The voiceover resonating deeply through our chests helps.

Dahomey explores legacy by watching today. For both the colonizers and the colonized, it is something special.