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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Computing and artificial intelligence
Why large language models are mysterious – even to their creators
8 minutes
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Sports and games
Havana’s streets become racetracks in this exhilarating portrait of children at play
5 minutes
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Spirituality
Through rituals of prayer, a monk cultivates a quietly radical concept of freedom
4 minutes
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Evolution
The many ways a lizard tongue sticks, grasps, pinches and plops – in slo-mo
6 minutes
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Fairness and equality
‘To my old master’ – a freed slave answers the request to return to his old plantation
7 minutes
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Design and fashion
A ceramicist puts her own bawdy spin on the folk language of pottery
14 minutes
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Animals and humans
Villagers struggle to keep their beloved, endangered ape population afloat
19 minutes
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Art
Radical doodles – how ‘exquisite corpse’ games embodied the Surrealist movement
15 minutes
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Language and linguistics
Why Susan listens to recordings of herself speaking a language she no longer remembers
5 minutes