All language subtitles for Chant.du.Styrene.1958.EN

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