Once, not too long ago, there was a perfect chemical formula of imperfection.
It changed the way we captured and imagined the world as we know it.
But then things changed.
The digital dark ages took hold of our lives.
The perfect formula was lost.
My dream, which I used to talk about then...
...off being able to take a wallet out of my pocket...
...press a button...
...and have the picture.
In these dark times, we wait.
But there's still hope.
I'm really looking forward to seeing this result.
A few seconds.
Yeah, it's an important experiment.
A few seconds, a few seconds.
Is this actually Gen 2?
Waiting for a wonder.
Three minutes.
It's too slow.
I don't call this 'Instant film'.
It's different from what Dr. Land did.
We have to change the process.
99 million tons of snow fall on New York...
...in the greatest storm of its recorded history.
The precipitation catches the great city unawares...
...and gradually puts the big town in a deep-freeze.
As the snow descends at the rate of two inches per hour...
...car travel becomes hazardous.
Thousands are marooned away from home...
...as travel facilities halt and accidents multiply in the streets.
This is when The New York Times first reported...
...on the invention of a new form called 'one-step photography'.
Edwin Land presented it at the...
...meeting of The American Optical Society in February, 1947, here in New York...
...the day after a huge snowstorm almost shut the whole place down.
He demonstrated it in front of a room full of scientists...
...by taking a large-format photograph of himself...
...and revealing it, peeling it open, 60 seconds later.
There's also an editorial in The Times the same day.
It says: There's nothing like this in the history of photography.
Dr. Edwin Land claims to have invented a new camera...
...which will revolutionize photography.
It all looks quite ordinary right up to the time he takes a picture.
But, says the doctor, the difference is that all you have to do with his camera...
...is to wait exactly one minute, then open it up...
...and you'll find the negative and the print.
When I was about 13 or 14, I got my own Polaroid camera for the first time.
I bought it in the junk room of a bookstore for three dollars.
It ended up accidentally starting me on this journey that I'm still taking.
I'm the author of 'Instant: The Story of Polaroid'.
In 2008, Polaroid announced that it was going to stop manufacturing film.
It felt like I was confronted with the death of a friend.
I was a new parent at the time. I was juggling a full-time job...
...but I wanted this story to get told...
...to keep this technological vision alive.
Almost anyone you ask knows what a Polaroid photograph is.
At its peak, Polaroid sold more than a billion individual photographs a year.
It was an enormous company.
There was a fantastic character at the center of it all in Edwin Land.
He was really one of the great visionaries of American technology.
He had a vision for the future of the evolving human being.
The founding myth of Polaroid photography goes like this:
Edwin Land, on vacation with his daughter at the end of 1943.
They were in the mountains of New Mexico...
...and he had taken photographs of her all day with his Rolleiflex.
At the end of the afternoon, his daughter, who was three, asked him:
'Daddy, why can't I see the photos now?'
And Land asked himself: 'Well, why can't she?'
The story goes that he sent her off to be with her mother for a while...
...and he spent the night pacing the resort...
...working a rough form of his invention out in his head.
In 1985, during the course of the work undertaken to irrigate the Gobi desert...
...a strange fragment of rock was discovered.
Research revealed that it contained a 'spool'.
Further analysis showed the material to be extraterrestrial in origin...
...and not of human manufacture.
Where did it come from?
A long time ago...
...back in Germany...
...when I was a little girl...
...I dreamed of the desert.
I had to wait...
...for the magic moment to manifest.
And...
Yeah, it just happened.
Colors show up in a very, very different way.
It was not what you actually see with your eyes.
It was like chemistry.
Poisonous.
Just scary.
And really intense.
It was so beautiful.
It triggered something in my creative being.
I believe I have always been a photographer.
The desert is definitely the canvas I work with.
Nobody sees you.
Nobody cares. You can do anything.
It's just magical.
Just like the Polaroids.
So this is my last Polaroid stock.
Choose some for today's shoot.
The new stock expired in April, 2009.
And some of the very old stock...
...expired in 2006.
I have to use these soon, otherwise they're not going to work anymore.
Of course I can't buy new, because...
...Polaroid stopped production a long time ago.
Sometimes you can still buy them on eBay, but for a lot of money.
So if this is gone, I guess I'm going to look for something else to do.
I don't know what I'm going to do, but I'm going to think of something.
There's tens of millions of Polaroid cameras out there in the modern-day world...
...waiting to be used again.
My mission it to reinvent the instant film...
...and keep this analog experience alive into the digital age.
Most people know something about photographic prints.
They know that a photograph is a reproduction of things...
...in terms of light and shade.
When we open the shutter, reflected light from the subject...
...is gathered by the lens and focused on the film.
When the shutter opens...
...the light penetrates and strikes the silver halide particles.
And those which the light reaches wake up.
And which cannot be seen until it is brought into visible form...
...by chemical means.
This is where the lightened image comes to life.
The one thing I always regretted...
...was not having been involved in Polaroid in its earliest time...
...when they were really creating this from nothing.
So when the opportunity came along at The Impossible Project...
...to do what Dr. Land had done originally, it was awful enticing.
Especially at my age and the stage I was in my career.
One of the things that Dr. Land did was, he believed a lot in secrecy.
The chemicals that were being made and used in the Polaroid film...
...were all assigned a code number.
They were never called by their chemical name.
Most people didn't know what they actually were.
The molecular design of the instant film...
...is very, very complicated.
The analog instant film...
...is the world's most chemically complex completely man-made product ever.
When you start to assemble all this chemistry together...
...there's all kinds of side reactions that happen.
Many of which we don't even know what they are.
Just like a living organism, it's got a mind of its own.
As the world passed into the second half of the 20th century after the birth of Christ...
...beyond the dreams of its ancestors...
...modern man has molded the earth to his liking.
Proud of his vast creative ability...
...he can boast of the grandeur of his achievements...
...and admire the scope of his own imagination.
How you use your eyes to see...
...brings about new forms of human association and action.
Are you living in today's world?
The walls of your worlds are coming down.
It's becoming a simple matter to pick out of your homes...
...your private, once solely personal life, and record it.
Ours is a brand new world of all-at-onceness.
We now share too much about each other...
...to be strangers to each other.
The chemistry of Polaroid film being analog...
...in comparison to digital is closer to the way we're made of.
I think there's also an analogy to human interaction.
Which is the most mysterious of all to me.
Land envisioned a future in which you always have a camera with you.
Not a big, bulky one, but something small and simple...
...that inserted no impediment between photographer and subject.
That nothing else would disrupt the moment.
The idea would be that you would just shoot pictures all day long.
A future in which one would document one's life all the time.
In 1970 he made a short film called 'The Long Walk'.
In it, he talks about the future of photography.
He reaches into his coat pocket and pulls out a black wallet.
Everyone who sees it has the same reaction: 'What did I just see?'
Because it looks for all the world like he's holding a black iPhone.
They were a long way from the dream which I used to talk about then...
...of being able to take a wallet out of my pocket...
...and perhaps open the wallet, press a button, close the wallet...
...and have the picture.
The camera that would be, oh, like the telephone...
...something that you use all day long.
Our long-awaited, ultimate camera...
...that is a part of the evolving human being.
And that was almost forty years ago.
He once said that for a product to be truly new...
...the world must not be ready for it.
Because if the world were ready for it, it wouldn't be much of an invention.
Very sexy, totally see-through.
Where's the gun? I don't know where the guns are.
This is cute.
So you're just, like, getting through the area, taking a break...
...on the way to your dream farm.
Is that a bracelet?
I brought the flower crown with me.
It'’s funny, because if you open the thing, you will laugh.
Sort of the same thing that you're carrying there.
The first shoot I did, taking people out to the desert...
...gave me the idea to make a big project out of...
...different characters living in trailer parks.
Trying to find love.
Trying to understand the world. Make sense out of the world.
The sun's already gone.
Shit.
Maybe the face after.
Don't look at me.
Yeah, that's good.
Keep doing what you're doing. I'm just going to both of you.
"Yippee ki-yay, motherfucker!"
For me the essence of my work is telling stories.
A little bit further down with the head towards me.
Yeah, looking more into the camera.
Living out your desires, fantasies.
Building a new world...
...which is far away from the regular world.
One morning I didn't wake up.
I was worn out, I had a fever.
I fell asleep again and I dreamed.
My chest felt squeezed.
Certainly it is because of the close-fitting elastic bandages it is wrapped in.
A little bird said morning for her love.
The frozen wind crept on up her.
The freezing stream below. There was no leaf upon the forest bower...
...no flowers upon the ground and little motion in the air...
...except for the mill wing's sound.
Charlie Brown...
My little movie star. We're going to get you a little star on the Hollywood Boulevard.
You're going to be the most famous of all of them.
"Charlie Brown, here comes Charlie Brown."
Nice.
I think he peed on me. - Charlie Brown peed on you? No way.
I feel wetness.
On my hand.
I don't see anything. - I feel it in my hand.
It didn't. - I feel something wet on my hand.
He might have spit a little bit on your hand.
No, it's coming out of him onto my left hand.
Hey, sweetie.
Was it just that? - OK, I guess it was drool.
I didn't know he'd do that. I thought it had to be pee.
No, they don't really pee. They shit.
Since I've been a little girl, I actually thought: Oh, we wanted to go to America.
In the middle of the desert, in the middle of nowhere would be wonderful.
But then when I came to America...
...I just had a hit-and-run accident.
I was seven years on crutches.
I had thirty operations. It was pretty hardcore.
That changed my life.
My way of seeing things.
There might be bad things happening...
...but still you have some kind of control of them...
...by creating a world within a world.
This is so cool. I love this picture.
I love this color explosion. That looks like little flowers.
All 'problems' of an expired Polaroid.
Here you get, like, the chemistry didn't develop anymore...
...and you can see the rollers while they pushed out the film.
Where you can see the yellow part.
Those poor girls really had to work a lot.
I totally embrace these kind of mistakes.
I think life is unpredictable.
Therefore it's really great that the films are so unpredictable.
'Wabi-sabi' is a Japanese term...
...for something which is imperfect.
But it also means that...
...only things are perfect which are imperfect.
Like a dish with a chip, because it tells a story. It has a life.
Perfect.
Love.
Friendship.
Color.
Memories.
Future.
Love.
I really was married to Polaroid. I started in 1977...
...and left in 2005. That's 28 years.
Dr. Land, his last five years with Polaroid...
...were my first five years.
He was clearly a great role model for me as somebody who knew how to do science.
He knew the value of doing experiments...
...and would tell you that there's no such thing as a failed experiment.
To join this adventure, I had to move to Europe.
It was a pretty major decision, because it involved...
...leaving my wife for a good part of this time.
I just couldn't resist.
It was a chance for me to get back to what I love the most...
...which is work on the reinvention of instant film.
The importance of dreams.
It is not easy to grasp this point.
It implies something vague, unknown, or hidden from us.
Man never perceives anything fully, or comprehends anything completely.
He can see, hear, touch and taste...
...but how far he sees, how well he hears...
...what his touch tells him and what he tastes...
...depend upon the number and quality of his senses.
By using scientific instruments...
...he can partly compensate for the deficiencies of his senses.
But the most elaborate apparatus cannot do more...
...than bring distant or small objects within range of his eyes...
...or make faint sounds more audible.
No matter what instrument he uses...
...at some point he reaches the edge of certainty...
...beyond which conscious knowledge cannot pass.
There are, moreover, unconscious aspects of our perception of reality.
It may appear, for instance, in the form of a dream.
The book just came out of me.
I wrote most of the time nights and weekends.
In two long train rides, I wrote about a third of the book.
There days when I wanted to be doing other things, but I couldn'’t 't stop.
Always a little voice looking over your shoulder...
...that says: You should be working on that a little more.
To keep this weird old way of making pictures going.
The first Polaroid Land camera, the old 95.
Graduating to a group of a couple of rangefinder cameras.
Then came the electric eye models...
...and more recently, the color pack cameras.
What a product story.
Polaroid photography did have an enormous effect on popular culture.
It was just everywhere.
There was even a Polaroid camera on a bad day in 1963.
The president of the United States is dead.
That is the only photo of the moment President Kennedy died.
What I love about this camera is that it allows you to capture the moment.
Every moment in life...
...that you stop and show: this happened just then and here.
And those are the moments we want to keep.
A lot of people think of Polaroid as a snapshot medium...
...but that you would never use it for something important.
That's really a misapprehension.
A great many photographers have pushed this medium to the point...
...where it really showed its ability.
Take a look at this base and see what kind of quality we have.
OK, that's one. Another one. No, that's Gen 2.
You can take a picture of me.
Now I'm going to do Thomas. Gen 3.
In fact in both of them. Looks like about the same place almost.
Two minutes.
But it should be...
The Gen 3 should, in a few minutes...
I'm not sure when. - It might be a little bit cold in this room.
Press a button...
...and have the picture.
Press a button...
...and have the picture.
Now.
There's probably been thirty or forty new molecules...
...that have been designed and synthesized and tested to come up with these.
And it's taken two and a half years, probably a little over two years.
But the Gen 3 should start to brighten up...
...and move into its final phase.
It's too slow.
When the Impossible Film started...
...after a number of years we were able to put together a very basic recipe...
...that made the first Impossible films.
I don't call those instant films.
It's a full half an hour to get to a finished print.
Press a button...
When an instant print comes out of a camera, it's also the experience of time.
Press a button...
There's an organic process that you're pulled into.
You almost want to continue watching it.
There's a feel of the evolution of time passed. That's part of the whole experience.
In an instant digital print...
...there was no experience.
No mystery.
No sense of dreaming.
No sense of time.
It's like being put under with total anesthesia...
...and wake up four hours later.
There's nothing in-between.
There's nothing else.
It's very strange how time passes.
Most of these people I just don't know anymore.
No more connections to them.
And you were so close to people and they just disappear out of your life.
Very, very, very strange.
Gosh, this is a really nice box.
These are really... That's me when I was small.
My sister, my grandmother, mother, my great-grandmother.
That's a very long time ago.
No Polaroids back then.
Me in Cuxhaven growing up. On the beach, basically.
Me taking my first bath.
Oh my God, I was looking for these photos.
For years I've been looking for one particular photo album...
...with all my old student photos and my childhood passports.
This is basically... This batch is how I grew up.
I'm going through my life.
It's only such selective little parts.
My past was such a different time.
Because it was the time before digital came in.
They are all moments you remember, but no pictures exist of them.
Our memories are always somehow faded.
So everybody can project their own fantasies on the past.
I can't remember if I chose this life.
I think I must have, but I might not have known what I was in for.
My family turned out to be mostly jerks.
My mom says I was named after the champagne.
My dad likes to say I was named after his product.
I had a dog, Lucy.
Born when I was two. She was just about my only friend.
I got lost in the desert with her once. Really lost.
I dreamed that I wanted to quit my job hostessing at this restaurant and I was like:
I was going there to quit and I was freaking out...
...and then my skin just kept peeling off of me.
At first I thought it was sunburn.
But it was all over my face and I was peeling it off like a mask.
I felt like a new person as I was taking it off and I had this fresh skin underneath.
So I went to the...
I didn't tell you this part. So I went to the restaurant...
...and I saw my friend there.
She was like: Oh, I'm not happy in school, I want to leave.
And I was like: "If you're not happy, you have to leave. I had a dream about it."
So I told her in the dream that I had a dream. - So you had a dream in a dream?
Yeah, I said I had a dream about it.
"I think it's the right thing to do. You shouldn't go to school if it doesn't make you happy."
"You have to follow what your dream is."
So then I left the restaurant and I was in this café...
...and I was giving this pitch for this movie I want to make...
...to this woman I know who's a producer...
...in LA, who's a real person, and I was giving the pitch to her...
...she was like: "I love this idea. I want to help you get it made."
And I left there and I was going to tell my family that I was going to make a movie.
It was really cool. And my skin was like... It was so weird peeling it off.
I would definitely say that the world is losing magic.
Today, of course, everything is covered.
So the way you perceive your past has completely changed.
That's also why you have a different memory today, which is instant memory.
I think people are obsessed with the necessity of moments.
And therefore also this deep feeling about time has changed.
That is actually what I don't want to be part of.
And so I'm stopping time...
...and creating my own time dimension.
We have art and order not to die of the truth.
That fits so well to my life.
Dining in the Altstadt.
I have a table for two.
I am missing you.
Lily's bar for lunch.
A Weiss bier and nice music.
Beginning to rain.
I find myself at times inspired to write haiku poetry.
It's like an instant print, which is a very small, single frozen piece of time.
Hey, Jenn.
Hey, I've been waiting.
You've got something coming up this weekend, right?
You're getting together with Cindy on Friday?
Friday's going to be great. - What are you doing?
The Museum of Fine Arts has an exhibit of Dutch painters.
Are you kidding?
No, it's just ironic. We saw so many Dutch paintings together.
That's funny. I just got done talking to Zach who's been visited this weekend...
...by a woman from Amsterdam who's a composer that he knows.
I'd love to go to that jazz festival in Amsterdam.
Actually, it's in Hamburg. - Do you know what week it is?
I think it's in April, isn't it? I will look it up.
The other thing I want to do this weekend is pick out a Christmas tree. Alone, again.
I just talked to Zach and I asked him to help, like he did last year.
Help you get the tree and put it up.
Sorry I'm not able to do that with you.
All right. I probably won't have time to do a lot of it for you.
I'll see you again at Christmas, but I'll be looking forward to that.
I'll see you later.
Bye bye, love. - I love you. I'll talk to you tomorrow.
Bye bye. - See you.
Well, there it is.
The Polaroid 1000 instant camera. The world's simplest camera.
It's the exciting Christmas present...
...that lets you enjoy your pictures in minutes in brilliant color.
For instant excitement, instant laughter...
...instant fun.
This is something Edwin Land wrote on March 25, 1974:
"When a new medium comes into our midst...
...we proceed to use it pretty much as we used older media."
"We could not have known and I've only just learned...
...that a new kind of relationship between people in groups...
...is brought into being by instant film...
...when the members of a group are photographing and being photographed...
...and sharing the photographs."
"It turns out that buried within us...
...God knows beneath how many pregenital and Freudian and Calvinistic strata...
...there is latent interest in each other."
"There is tenderness, curiosity, excitement, affection, companionability and humor."
"It turns out in this cold world where man grows distant from man...
...that we have a prehistoric tribal competence...
...in being partners in the lonely exploration of a once-empty planet."
Land really thought that his invention was a tool...
...that would change the way people related to one another.
He was extremely romantic about his creation...
...and quite the idealist.
Can you wrap me the captions on that file again?
I just want to make two changes and run it by the fact checker...
...and then we can take it to proof. That'll be good before the end of the day.
Thanks. I'll get them back to you in ten minutes.
That's a silly pose. Can you look at me?
Let me see.
I like that one better. You're smiling a lot more.
I think it really...
I think it really captures my personality.
You like that one better? - Yeah. Just my mind wandering.
I think it really captures my personality.
Yeah, that one's better. You're making a sort of silly face, though.
Yeah, but it's the best I can do.
It probably comes out that I take close to a photo a day of Alex.
Not quite, but pretty nearly.
I hope that it gives him a way to connect his childhood...
...to something that I was interested in and writing about.
You know, he will be one of the last kids...
...to have been photographed this way.
I've got enough film to last a few more years, but it's going to dry up soon.
So, he'll be one of the last ones who remembers how it smelled...
...and how it felt to peel one of those pictures open and see it.
You know, when I'm fifty years out of the picture...
...he'll remember it. That's nice.
It still makes me laugh looking at it.
Just nine months old, I guess. Something like that.
And it was Christmas.
Polaroid photography is social...
...in the way that when you take an instant picture...
...you pull it out of the camera and it develops on the spot.
And there's a little time lag. It takes a minute or two, or three, to happen.
During that time, if the person you've just taken a picture of...
...doesn't know you well, if it's a stranger at a party
...or an occasional acquaintance, you know...
...you're sort of forced to make small talk to fill in the moment.
The eye is surprisingly forgiving.
I had a Polaroid executive say this to me once.
That they're always hung up on: Is it as good as 35mm quality?
And he said: "Go pick up a newspaper. You're looking at a bunch of dots."
The eye forgives anything, if it's a good photograph.
You know that famous story about Dustin Hoffman...
...and Laurence Olivier on 'Marathon Man'?
I don't.
Dustin Hoffman would stay up all night, so he would come in disheveled and dirty.
And Olivier looked at him once and said:
"My dear boy, you should try acting. It's much easier."
Are you taking a picture?
For God's sake, I got to reload.
Hang on.
I look a little lazy.
It's Friday night. Lazy is OK.
That's good.
Let's see what we've got.
You know you don't shake?
You know the thing that celebrities always do?
Where you get the shoulders square and the hip turned...
...and the arm out. - Square.
That's right. That one. Exactly.
The earlier forms... You know when you peel them off?
It came off wet.
And you had to shake it to dry it.
This is a fun one, 'cause it folds.
Isn't it cute?
How do you know these guys?
Hang on. Sorry, the flash didn't go off. - Oh, no.
How do you know these guys?
Your eye forgives. Look at a newspaper. It's all dots.
Right, right. - It's all right.
What's this kind of camera? - This is an SX-70.
Which you can see in 'Boogie Nights'.
I mean, this is my house, it's my birthday, all of my friends right here.
That's my wife.
And that's her, like right now. - That's her two minutes ago.
As you take people's pictures, people gather around to look at it...
...and ask to have their picture taken.
So the circle of that moment widens to a small group.
And then the second thing that happens...
...is that the photo itself, because it's a one-of-a-kind object...
...because there's no digital file or negative...
...gets given to the subject.
This, as far as I know, is just about unique in photography.
It doesn't happen that way with any other form.
There won't be digital files that were transferred...
...from phone to computer, to the next computer, to the next computer...
...and stored away on a hard drive somewhere.
Very often, you will never see the image again.
It's like an artefact of time.
Like a ghost came out of the machine.
Once, not too long ago, there was a perfect chemical formula of imperfection.
But then things changed.
A digital image is a stream of dots, ones and zeros.
An analog instant picture has three dimensions.
It has thickness...
...and volume.
It weighs something.
I like to describe the invention to end all inventions.
I call it The Replicator.
It's a duplicating machine that can make an exact copy of anything.
Confronted with such a device, our present society would probably...
...sink into a kind of gluttonous barbarism.
Because everybody would want unlimited quantities of everything...
...since nothing would cost anything.
In fact, cynics may doubt if any human society...
...could survive an invention...
...which would lead to unlimited abundance...
...and the final ending of the curse of Adam...
Every human is unique.
It's not an exact replica, it's not a clone.
The human body that has a level of chemical complexity...
...and a biochemistry that is just incredible.
We are trying to modify it...
...but in my opinion, that is a subjective thing.
It is perfect, but, also, it is imperfect. All at the same time.
Maybe just... Turn towards the sun so it's obviously not... Remember?
Exactly. That's good. That's great.
I ask myself this: Why did God create us?
What was his purpose?
The world walking by.
I'm watching the reflections in some sunglasses.
There's a line somewhere. It's not clearly defined.
We must not cross it.
These are part of the 20 years of work, but it's only one of the safes.
So we have another one.
So there's 700 in each drawer.
And there are 23 drawers, by 700.
A great deal of the secret of our success...
...has been that we have concentrated on concepts.
That has given us a heavy, technological weighting...
...that has let us be years ahead of the field.
The very end has elements of tragedy, for sure.
Its very success, in some ways...
...was the thing that made it fearful about change.
Every time a new environment forms with a new medium...
...people go back and live in the old one.
Any new medium completely alters the image we have of ourselves.
Of this, you are completely unaware.
Land, although he was one of the great visionaries...
...was caught in the wrong time frame.
The limitations of analog media that they couldn't be shared in volume globally...
...cut him off from the larger world impact...
...that digital photography then opened up.
...take a wallet out of my pocket...
Welcome to the Instant Lab.
You have to choose an image for exposure.
Do this now.
By the time they realized, it was too late. It was the mid-Nineties...
...and Sony and the others were all way ahead of them.
Place your device face down on the cradle...
...in the top of the tower.
That was the sound of success.
Locate the shutter and pull it out all the way.
Do this now.
The device will make the exposure.
Slide the shutter all the way back.
Press the eject button located at the front of the Instant Lab...
...firmly for one second.
You have initiated the chemical reactions that will process your instant photo.
Wait for it.
Thank you for listening and remember: I can repeat any of my instructions.
The company went bankrupt in 2001. It was sold, and sold again.
That last buyer turned out to be a crook.
He'd stolen three billion dollars. He got fifty years.
The factories and the land under them were sold off.
The one in Waltham I visited.
It was demolished six weeks after I got there. There's a shopping center there now.
I am on the verge of change.
Because the narratives...
...came to a happy ending for me.
So everything I was working on and working through for so long...
...now became reality.
I'm living the dream now.
It seems...
...I want to, like, see something beyond the image.
To a point where an image becomes an imagination.
That... See the land up there? Alex?
That's the beginning of New Jersey.
And then there's a long pier over there.
Bapu, my dad, used to, when he was a little kid, fish off that pier.
He had a really long fishing pole...
...and go all the way out to the end and throw his line in the ocean.
You think we can do that someday? - Sure.
We should ask bapu. The three of us can go together.
He'd like that and I'd like that. Want to do it?
We could even go out on a fishing boat sometime, if you want.
Would you like that? - Cool.
I would love to do that.
Trying to predict the future...
...is a discouraging and hazardous occupation.
If his predictions sound at all reasonable...
...you can be quite sure that in 20, or at most 50 years...
...the progress of science and technology...
...has made him seem ridiculously conservative.
On the other hand, if by some miracle...
...a prophet could describe the future exactly as it was going to take place...
...his predictions would sound so absurd, so far-fetched...
...that everybody would laugh him for scorn.
There's an interesting quote from Arthur C. Clarke...
...that I think really applies to us:
"The only way of discovering the limits of the possible...
...is to venture a little way beyond and into the impossible."
It's my own opinion that when it comes to future directions...
...we can learn an awful lot from visionaries and people like Dr. Land.
To show us possibilities and which way to go...
...beyond what most of us would be conceiving of.
People who have this passion to develop technologies...
...that nobody had even imagined...
...and continue to keep dreaming of what human nature is...
...and what it eventually becomes in the future.
Not too bad.
Very good. Think it will survive two cats and a grandbaby?
I think it will.
Merry Christmas. - You look handsome.
Watch the film. - OK, sir.
That's going to be a great shot.