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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Rituals and celebrations
Beware the Nalujuit! A rare glimpse into a chilling Labrador Inuit tradition
13 minutes
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Future of technology
Artificial ‘creativity’ is unstoppable. Grappling with its ethics is up to us
23 minutes
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Design and fashion
Refined towards imperfection – a ceramic artist recreates a rare Korean treasure
15 minutes
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Wellbeing
Through a poetic account of childhood trauma, one woman reclaims her past
28 minutes
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Politics and government
‘Without a poster, you don’t exist!’ – on the curious political banners of Mumbai
20 minutes
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Global history
The famed medieval map that stretched beyond Earth to heaven, history and myth
5 minutes
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Earth science and climate
A biologist on the sorrows of documenting the Great Salt Lake’s collapse
6 minutes
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Music
As a pianist strikes a chord, visualisations of his notes appear in real time
5 minutes
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Human rights and justice
Meet the man who uncovered the scandal of nuclear testing in South Australia
13 minutes