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In the short film Bead Game (1977) by the acclaimed Indian-Canadian filmmaker Ishu Patel, stopmotion animation of coloured glass beads offers a beautiful yet dark vision of life, characterised by brutal cycles of competition and consumption. Beginning with a single bead, a series of organisms – real and imagined – split, combine, transform and devour one another, yielding first the emergence of human forms, and eventually the horrors of nuclear war. Inspired by the beadwork of Inuit women, Patel’s dazzling and urgent response to the atomic age won critical acclaim upon its release, receiving a BAFTA award for Best Short Fictional Film and an Academy Award nomination for Best Short Film (Animated).
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Biology
Butterflies become unrecognisable landscapes when viewed under electron microscopes
4 minutes
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Art
Background music was the radical invention of a trailblazing composer
17 minutes
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Gender
A filmmaker responds to Lars von Trier’s call for a new muse with a unique application
16 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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Biology
Starlings swoosh like brushstrokes across the sky in this dazzling short
3 minutes
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Beauty and aesthetics
In art, the sublime is a feedback loop, evolving with whatever’s next to threaten us
9 minutes
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Film and visual culture
Our world has very different contours when a millimetre is blown up to a full screen
8 minutes
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Beauty and aesthetics
Can you see music in this painting? How synaesthesia fuelled Kandinsky’s art
10 minutes
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Technology and the self
A haunting scene from ‘Minority Report’ inspires a voyage into time and memory
7 minutes