German artist Stefanie Schneider takes Polaroids with expired stock in Instant Dreams
INSTANT DREAMS (Willem Baptist, 2017)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
Opens Friday, April 19
212-529-6799
instantdreamsmovie.com
www.cinemavillage.com
There’s an eye-opening “wow” moment in Willem Baptist’s documentary Instant Dreams in which Polaroid camera inventor Edwin H. Land, in a short 1970 promotional film, The Long Walk, reaches into his pocket, pulls out a black wallet that resembles an iPhone, and refers to it as a “camera that would be, oh, like the telephone, something that you use all day long, a long-awaited ultimate camera that is a part of the evolving human being.” The shot is shocking and eerie; how did this visionary see the future so clearly? In Instant Dreams, Dutch filmmaker Baptist (Wild Boar, I’m Never Afraid) follows four people obsessed with the Polaroid camera, which was invented by Land in 1948 so we could “press a button and have a picture”; the company stopped making its iconic white-bordered film for the cameras in 2008, but that has not stopped enthusiasts from continuing their passion. One of the four is Christopher Bonanos, a New York magazine editor and author of the book Instant: The Story of Polaroid; in the movie, he shares some of the history of Land and Polaroid and takes pictures of friends and family, especially his young son, who he says will be among the last to experience the feel and smell of a developing Polaroid photo, which can take between one and three minutes to finish. He also talks about Land’s prescience about the next era of photography, pointing out that “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.”
Dr. Stephen Henchen is a research scientist formerly with Polaroid who explains, “My mission is to reinvent the instant film and keep this analog experience alive into the digital age.” As part of the Impossible Project, which aims to make Polaroid film available again, he spends time in labs experimenting and writing down formulas, trying to re-create Land’s patented process, but he notes that “the molecular design of the instant film is very, very complicated. Analog instant film is the world’s most chemically complex, completely man-made product ever.” German artist Stefanie Schneider uses her limited amount of expired Polaroid stock on photo shoots where she photographs models and her longtime partner in scenes depicting memories, desires, and fantasies, embracing the film’s unpredictability and imperfections. (Baptist also includes clips of Schneider’s 2013 short Heather’s Dream, starring Heather Megan Christie and Udo Kier.) And Ayana JJ, a young Japanese woman, represents the younger generation, shooting photos in a bustling Tokyo — until Baptist reveals a surprise near the end, complete with the commanding voice of Werner Herzog.
Author and editor Christopher Bonanos takes Polaroid photos of his son nearly every day
Baptist supplements the film with colorful, kaleidoscopic animation representing the chemical reactions involved in the Polaroid process, evoking the resolutely analog psychedelic imagery of the Joshua Light Show. He also provides numerous close-ups of people’s eyes as they look at the world — and then try to capture it on film. It’s fascinating to see how the bulky Polaroid cameras were the progenitors of the smartphone and the digital age of social media; at one point, Bonanos attends a birthday party and takes a seat on a couch, where many of the attendees sit for their portrait. This social interaction, which would not have taken place without the camera, brings Bonanos together with people he might not otherwise have spoken to, and they spend at least several minutes with each other, first posing for the photo, then waiting for it to develop. It’s a clear metaphor for today’s Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram, lacking only the internet’s instant face-to-face sharing over distance. The film points out that in March 1974, Land wrote, “We could not have known, and have only just learned, that a new kind of relationship between people and groups is brought into being by instant film when the members of a group are photographing and being photographed and sharing the photographs.” With Polaroids, it occurs in different elements of time and space, the cameras supported by devoted fans unwilling to let their memories disappear amid technology run amok.