"THE STYRENE SONG" "Director / Alain Resnais" "Man is served by blind matter" "He thinks, he searches, he creates!" "With his living breath the buds of nature" "Tremble as a forest rustles in the wind" "Victor Hugo" "Oh mystic time" "Oh plastic substance!" "Where do you come from?" "Who are you?" "What can explain your rare qualities?" "What are you made of?" "What is your origin?" "Let us rediscover the ancestors from the object itself!" "Let us reverse the story" "First here is the mold and we surround the prototype" "This mysterious being" "Produces anything it wants" "But the mold itself is part of a press" "Which injects the paste and shapes the piece" "The greatest advantage is the ability" "To complete such work with no further procedures" "The mold is expensive which is a small disadvantage" "But it can be used in many ways" "Vacuum shaping is another method of making things" "A little suction is all it takes" "The carefully arranged warm material" "Gets laid out on the board" "To enter the nozzle, a piston and a heating adaptor are required or we could say an adapted heater then we turn the rough polystyrene to fine granules" "And the granules on the vibrant sieve are full of beautiful colors" "Before turning into granules they had been like straws" "Straws of all colors and tones" "These straws had been arranged in a series in the shape of a long cylinder held together by screws" "Which through this, colored pearls of every variety are made" "And how did the coloring pigment" "Uniformly attach itself on the polystyrene?" "It needs to be rotated and hardened before it tumbles in a rotary" "That's how the polymer polystyrene is born from the simple styrene" "Polymerization occurs when molecules combine" "To become a complex chemical combination" "And in the concave belly of a basic autoclave machine" "Molecules cling to each other like pearls linked together" "But before that" "The styrene was volatile a colorless liquid with odor" "Take a good look as this is your only chance to see the liquid" "Styrene is produced in large quantities from overheated ethylbenzene" "It requires catalysts such as" "Oxide, zinc, and magnesium" "In the past styrene was extracted from benzoin" "Of the styrax family, a small tree found in Indonesia" "From tube to tube, it proceeds through a desert of channels" "Back towards its original product towards the abstract material" "That circulates endlessly while it cleans, distills, and redistills" "A certain degree of temperature is needed for ethylbenzene to explode" "We must now ask where ethylene and benzene come from" "They are extracted from the magical liquid of petroleum oil" "And also extracted from coal" "To make ethylene and benzene both petroleum oil and coal are fine" "Transformed into gas the coal combusts" "And gives birth to these hydrocarbons" "We should strike out on these new paths" "And examine why the one and the other exists" "Does petroleum come from masses of fish?" "We do not know much about coal nor from where it comes" "Does petroleum come from plankton?" "It's a controversial question with obscure origins" "And petroleum and coal were vanishing into smoke" "Before that chemist came a happy idea" "To render the smokes solid and to fashion Innumerable useful objects" "And these obscure residues were thus transformed into new things" "And there remain other things yet unknown Awaiting still similar efforts" "To make them the subject of other documentaries"