Light, Darkness, and Colors (review)

This is not merely an instructional video; it is an award-winning film, having received two prizes in international film competitions. It is a reinterpretation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's interesting and still radical book on the theory of colors, Zur Farbenlehre (1810), but the film itself is so well made—so precisely narrated, photographed and edited—that the subject matter is secondary. Whatever the topic, the film is a memorable lesson in very smart thinking and seeing. In terms of its subject, it speaks to the difference between Goethe's conclusions about everyday color experiences and Sir Isaac Newton's isolated laboratory experiments, in which sunlight was passed through a prism. In modern terms, Newton's investigations were atomistic (like looking through a telescope and thereby enlarging the details) while Goethe's were contextual, or holistic (like looking through the wrong end of the telescope and thereby perceiving the overall plan, the "big picture"). Goethe is commonly said to have been the first person to popularize the word "gestalt." To Newton, colors were effects of light, events produced within the eye by light waves of differing physical lengths, while darkness was a mere negative, defined only as "the absence of light." In Goethe's theory (which looks and sounds like figure-ground in gestalt theory or the symbolism of yin and yang in Taoism), light and dark are inseparable and of equal importance and color is a consequence not only of light but of a "light-darkness polarity." One cannot deny Goethe's poetic genius, but his writings on color are usually called "mystical," "subjective" and artistic digressions that wrongfully strayed into scientific territory. This delightful film, which uses time-lapse photography and ingenious scientific proofs, strongly suggests that he may have been right after all.