Observations on the Origins of Life and Animation: David Lebrun's Proteus: A Nineteenth Century Vision

The further my investigations proceeded the more immeasurable seemed the range of forms, like the boundless firmament of stars.

—Ernst Haeckel, "Report on the Radiolaria," in Report on the Scientific Results of the Voyage of H.M.S. Challenger during the Years 1873–1876, Vol. 18, 1887

In 2004, animation artist and filmmaker David Lebrun completed the experimental documentary Proteus: A Nineteenth Century Vision (figure 1). The film details the life and work of the German biologist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), who was a prominent figure alongside Charles Darwin in nineteenth-century evolutionary theory, embryology, zoology, and the study of natural history or, to borrow Haeckel's words, "the origin and past history of the universe, the earth, and its organic population."¹ Haeckel's research focused largely on the origins and development of life, particularly at the level of unicellular organisms that were key to his theory of abiogenesis, which holds that the earliest forms of life on Earth sprang

Figure 1.

Screen grab from Proteus, dir. David Lebrun (2004; New York: First Run Features, 2008). DVD.

spontaneously from nonliving matter. His views on this subject and others were and remain controversial. Haeckel was committed, for example, to developing philosophies of life and science that challenged religious doctrines and have been linked to the history of scientific racism, a topic to which I will return.² His work was also powerfully shaped by art and philosophy. Haeckel was an avid landscape painter, quite fond of the work of the German Romantic Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and wrote poetically about sentient atoms and the biology of "cell-souls" in everything from the protoplasm in amoebas to plants and humans (figure 2).³

In Proteus, Lebrun explores Haeckel's place in the history of science by focusing on a central figure in the biologist's work: the radiolarian (figure 3). Dating at least to the Cambrian period (around 541 million years ago), this single-celled sea-dwelling organism captivated Haeckel because of its relevance to his work on the origins of life and because it seemed to him capable of developing an apparently endless range of forms, "like the boundless firmament of stars" as he put it in a seminal treatise on the subject in 1887.⁴ Haeckel did not discover the radiolarian, but his research on it was preeminent and driven by a curiosity about how these microscopic forms captured the beauties and wonders of broader patterns in the natural world.⁵ Of particular interest are the organism's intricate radial skeletal structures, the fossilized remains of which are embedded in much of the ocean floor. These complex arrangements of trellises, spines, and spikes belie the radiolarian's simplicity as a single-celled organism and, for Haeckel, made biology inseparable from aesthetic contemplation.

Proteus orients viewers to Haeckel's research on the radiolarian in three ways. The first is with the aid of expository documentary techniques, such as voice-over narration and the display of archival materials that relay factual information about Haeckel's life and work in the context of nineteenth-century biology and the study of natural history. This biographical project is alternated throughout the film with voice-over readings of the Romantic poet Samuel Coleridge's 1798 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, in which a sailor recounts a sea voyage that was plagued by misfortune meted out by spirits after the sailor shoots and kills an albatross. This second

Figure 2.

Illustration of the "cell-soul" of a sponge. From Ernst Haeckel, "Cell-Souls and Soul-Cells," in Ernst Haeckel, The Pedigree of Man and Other Essays, trans. Edward B. Aveling (London: A. and H. B. Bonner, 1903), 171.

Figure 3.

Scanning electron microscope images of fossilized radiolaria. Source: The Microfossil Image Recovery and Circulation for Learning and Education (MIRACLE) project, Micropalaeontology Unit of the Earth Sciences Department, University College London, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/GeolSci/micropal/radiolaria.html...