Proteus:
A Nineteenth Century Vision
by David Lebrun
First Run / Icarus Films, Brooklyn NY,
2004
VHS, 61 mins., col./ b/w
Sales: Video-DVD, $390; rental: video,
$125
Distributor’s website: http://www.frif.com.
Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens
Department of Art, University of Northern
Iowa
ballast@netins.net
My favorite statement by German scientist
Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) is not mentioned
in this film. A zoologist, scientific
illustrator, and advocate of pantheism
("God is everywhere"), he wrote
in 1899, in The Riddle of the Universe,
that the typical Christian description
of God is that of "a gaseous vertebrate."
This wonderfully interesting, prize-winning
film provides an informative overview
of Haeckel’s intellectual growth,
the social setting in which his ideas
matured, and the progress of his writings
on evolutionary biology (he popularized
the "tree of descent," the notion
of ecology, and the biogenetic assumption
that the development of an individual
(ontogeny) is indicative of the stages
by which its species evolved (phylogeny)).
Haeckel was among the most widely read
writers of the 19th century,
and yet he is all but forgotten today.
When his name is mentioned, it may not
be for his scientific writings, but for
the innumerable drawings he made (using
a microscope connected to a camera lucida
tracing device) from live specimens of
astonishing one-celled animals called
radiolarians. These tiny sea creatures
were called that because their silicon
skeletons are examples of radial symmetry;
yet (like snowflakes), no two are identical,
and their variety is truly amazing.
I’ve been aware of Haeckel’s
work for years because I own a copy of
Art Forms in Nature, a book of
his drawings and paintings that was first
published in 1904 and was more recently
reissued (with the plates only, without
his scientific text) by Dover Publications
in 1974. Those same images are used inventively
throughout this film to produce animated
sequences of the similarities and differences
of radiolarians and other protozoa, a
term that purposely alludes to Proteus,
the Greek god of the sea, who (like radiolarians)
could appear in countless varied forms.
Haeckel’s greatest influence was
Charles Darwin, but, as this film postulates,
he may have been equally influenced by
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s attempts
to reconcile art with science; by The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the epic
poem about the sea and creativity by Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, who described the ocean
as "the reservoir of the soul";
and, most surprisingly, by the inadvertent
research of ocean life that came from
the laying of the first transatlantic
telegraph cable by Cyrus Fields in 1866.
When this film premiered in 2004, it was
deservedly given awards at several film
festivals as the "best documentary."
In watching it, I learned quite a lot
about Ernst Haeckel as a person, Darwinian
evolution theory, the beginnings of oceanography,
the Victorian era, and society’s
age-old equation of the quixotic moods
of the ocean with madness and the imagination–so
much so that, prior to the formation of
mental institutions, people who were mentally
ill were sometimes set adrift on ships,
in ill-fated crafts that were commonly
known as "ships of fools."
(Reprinted by permission from Ballast
Quarterly Review, Volume 20 Number
4, Summer 2005.)
