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Light, Darkness, and Colors
directed by Henrik Boetius, Marie Louise Lauridsen, and Marie Louise
Lefevre. Produced by Lise Lense-Moller for Magic Hour Films, U.K., 1998.
52 minutes
Available from First Run / Icarus Films. 32 Court Street, 21st Floor.
Brooklyn, NY 11201. Website: http://www.frif.com
Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens, Department of Art, University of Northern
Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA 50613-0362, U.S.A. E-mail: ballast@netins.net
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 the German poet 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 subject,
it speaks to the difference between Goethe's conclusions about everyday
color experiences and Sir Issac 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). To follow, 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 ying-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.
(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review, Vol. 16, No. 4, Summer 2001.)
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