Powers of Ten
1977 · 9m · USA
Directed by Charles Eames, Ray Eames
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, whimsical
Starting from a lakeside picnic in Chicago, the camera zooms out by powers of ten every ten seconds to the edge of the observable universe, then returns and plunges inward into a human hand down to the subatomic scale, visualizing the relative size of everything in existence.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The Eameses zoom across forty orders of magnitude in nine minutes and somehow it never feels like a science class. Furniture designers, of all people, made the definitive cosmic short.
The Eameses' nine-minute zoom across forty orders of magnitude remains the cleanest piece of design-as-cosmology ever filmed, and the official YouTube upload from Eames Office is pristine.
A seamless 9-minute zoom spanning 40 orders of magnitude - the Eames designed information architecture as much as they did chairs, and you can feel both crafts here. YouTube confirms 9.2M views and 9:00 runtime, fully intact.
Reviews
Powers of Ten enables an audience member to think of himself a citizen of the universe.
A brilliant pictorial and textual embodiment of a wonderful idea.
Festivals
- National Film Registry 1998, Selected for Preservation