Proteus: A Nineteenth-Century Vision (review)

This beautiful and unusual documentary concerns Ernst Haeckel and his struggle to forge a meaningful life as a biologist. Although the film does not focus squarely on the history of medicine and health, it is well worth knowing about, especially for faculty who teach courses addressing the relations of science and culture in the nineteenth century.

In Proteus, Haeckel embodies a critical tension in nineteenth-century European culture: how to reconcile the rational world of science with the mysterious interior world of spirit. Focusing mainly on views of the ocean, Lebrun contrasts the Romantics, including Goethe and Coleridge (using the latter’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner), with the hard-headed world of scientists and engineers, represented by Cyrus Field’s Atlantic cable project in the late 1850s and 60s and the British scientific voyage of H.M.S. Challenger (1872–76). For Haeckel, who idolized Goethe but despaired of reconciling his aesthetic yearnings with his scientific interests, the discovery of the radiolaria dissolved this tension. Radiolaria are a large group of single-celled creatures with silicaceous spines that form delicate, symmetrical shapes. Haeckel became the world’s leading expert on this group, identifying thousands of new forms (including those collected on the Challenger voyage) and drawing on their symmetries in developing first his theory of morphology and, much later, his Art Forms in Nature. Haeckel’s union of the aesthetic and the rational was inseparable from his union of the spiritual and material, which expressed itself in a Goethean pantheism that developed into his evolutionary monism. Haeckel would become the leading Darwinian scientist in continental Europe, his version of Darwinism strongly flavored with his own monistic and aesthetic values.

Lebrun’s film is gorgeous. Virtually all of the images come from the nineteenth century, and they evoke the period through diverse means: sepia-tinted photos of Haeckel from his youth to old age, and of Messina, Würzburg, and Jena; scientific illustrations of radiolaria, cells, microscopes, and ocean-bottom dredging equipment; and Romantic paintings, Haeckel’s own watercolors, and Gustav Doré’s late-century illustrations of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The sound production is also effective, with different writings voiced distinctively by five different actors, and background sounds such as waves, seabirds, and cranking machinery evoking the nineteenth-century world. This is more than a documentary, too; it is also a work of creative art. The filmmaker himself was clearly taken with the beauty of the radiolaria, and his film includes captivating interludes that I think of as “radiolaria dances,” in which a series of radiolaria images follow rapidly on one another to mesmerizing minimalist music composed by Yuval Ron. These vividly demonstrate the enduring possibilities of successfully merging nature and art.

Haeckel is a controversial figure in the history of biology—a man with a deeply devoted following among scientific and spiritual evolutionists alike; an outspoken opponent of traditional Christianity; an innovator in scientific imagery whose stylized drawings of embryos have been considered fraudulent, both in his lifetime and more recently; and the author of eugenical views that, according to some, provided a “scientific” foundation for Nazi genocide (although the Nazis also repudiated his works). The controversies that swirled around him barely appear in this film, which instead focuses squarely on Haeckel’s struggles to reconcile the spiritual and aesthetic with the scientific. If only a partial picture of Haeckel, it is nevertheless an outstanding theme for a class on nineteenth-century biology or science—I use the film in this way in my modern science survey (though I cut out Coleridge to pare it to fifty minutes), and students are entranced.