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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Virtues and vices
Why Bennie tried to disappear, and what happened when he was found decades later
16 minutes
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History of technology
Curious singles and tech sceptics – what ‘computer dating’ looked like in 1966
6 minutes
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Cognition and intelligence
A father forgets his child’s name for the first time in this poetic reflection on memory
4 minutes
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Animals and humans
Join seabirds as they migrate, encountering human communities along the way
13 minutes
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Stories and literature
Two variants of a Hindu myth come alive in an animated ode to Indian storytelling
14 minutes
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Technology and the self
The commodified childhood – scenes from two sisters’ lives in the creator economy
14 minutes
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Fairness and equality
There’s a dirty side to clean energy in the metal-rich mountains of South Africa
10 minutes
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Food and drink
The passage of time is a peculiar thing in a 24-hour diner
14 minutes
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Art
Background music was the radical invention of a trailblazing composer
17 minutes