A young woman in a Che Guevara T-shirt blesses the group and a man projects material downloaded from the Internet from his laptop onto the wall.

I have not, as Kant enjoined, regarded each man as an end in himself, but as material that might be useful to me as a writer.

But in the late nineteenth century, that panoply of possibilities began to fall away with the arrival of a totally new kind of material - celluloid, the first man-made plastic.