The Great Arc

The scouts

A hand-drawn love letter to brutalist sculpture sounds like the safe choice—but Authouart's refusal to narrate La Défense as anything other than genuinely moving, without irony or subversion, is almost perverse in its earnestness; that kind of sincerity is the real contrarian move.

Authouart locates herself precisely in the lineage of the essay film and the artist's sketchbook tradition, treating animation not as spectacle but as the most honest medium for intimate observation of monumental form—the restraint and formal clarity here recalls the best of mid-century avant-garde nonfiction.

The singular choice is the decision to let the hand-drawing itself become the narrator: every sketch mark, every hesitation visible on screen, transforms what could be a documentary gloss into something tactile and alive, where process and subject become inseparable.