Henrik Boëtius, Marie Lousie Lauridsen, and Marie 373 Louise Lefèvre. Light, Darkness and Colours. Brooklyn, NY: Icarus Films, 2000

Summary

The focus of the video “Light, Darkness and Colours” is Goethe's Farbenlehre. Although the video in no way examines Goethe's theories in a systemic way, it does replicate many of his experiments and situates them within the context of Newton's experiments, theories of objectivity/subjectivity, and aesthetics, broadly understood. I received the video a week before I was to teach the Farbenlehre in a mixed graduate/advanced undergraduate class and was therefore able to try it out in the classroom. While the video has much to recommend it, I would only show parts of it in future classes. In some ways, an academic assessment of this video may be unfair. It was created for a broad European audience and not specifically for the classroom.

In the preface to his treatise on colors, Goethe tells us that ideally we would experience his work on color as a staged play: we would not content ourselves with merely reading it, but we would do the experiments and view the phenomena within nature so that we could experience the book from multiple perspectives. In many ways, the video provides such a staging. It replicates for the viewer a number of Goethe's experiments, including many of the technically more difficult ones. When I teach the Farbenlehre, I always have my students replicate experiments, but some are simply impossible to do without particular pieces of hard-to-get equipment or in some cases, replicas of the instruments that Goethe used. By showing us the more complex experiments, the video thus provides a much more complete view of Goethe's theory than would otherwise be possible in the normal classroom setting. For example, the various experiments that were done with a camera obscura were excellent and demonstrate to students the power and the functioning of this device. Similarly, the juxtaposition of Goethe's interpretation of several prism experiments against those of Newton visually displays how different the two men's approaches were to color and what was at stake for both. Newton wanted to have an objective understanding of light and color and Goethe a subjective one. These examples are an excellent way for students visually to experience what sorts of issues are at stake in Newtonian versus Goethean or quantitative versus qualitative science.