For Grands Canons, the French artist Alain Biet made extraordinarily precise drawings of hundreds of ordinary things – pencils and pens, flyswatters and corkscrews, shampoos and spatulas – to build a ‘visual symphony of everyday objects’. Biet adds another level of artistry via his meticulous stop-motion animations, ordering and arranging these lifelike illustrations to build an oddly entrancing viewing experience, complete with a jazzy score by the duo YeP* that evokes the sound of the objects fluttering across the screen. The resulting short film forms something of a tribute to human ingenuity – or, at the very least, a testament to Biet’s knack for mining magic from the mundane.
Director: Alain Biet
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Biography and memoir
As her world unravels, Pilar wonders at the ‘sacred geometry’ that gives it structure
20 minutes
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Meaning and the good life
Why strive? Stephen Fry reads Nick Cave’s letter on the threat of computed creativity
5 minutes
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Human rights and justice
‘I know that change is possible’ – a Deaf prison chaplain’s gospel of hope
18 minutes
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Physics
Find the building blocks of nature within a single, humble snowflake
4 minutes
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Technology and the self
An artist swaps her head with everyday objects in a musing on consumerism
4 minutes
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Art
The overlooked polymath whose theatrical oeuvre made all of Rome a stage
30 minutes
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Physics
Why the golden age of total solar eclipses is already behind us
5 minutes
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Film and visual culture
An augmented-reality filter reveals the hidden movements all around us
7 minutes
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Beauty and aesthetics
The grit of cacti and the drumbeat of time shape a sculptor’s life philosophy
11 minutes