Two different people I know–adult males with reasonable deportments–claim to have broken out in tears while watching Werner Herzog’s mesmerizing documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams.
As someone who has cried at a movie on an airplane and nearly wept the first time I saw large scale rock art in person, I figured this would be a fun experiment.
The water works did not go off (I have to confess I was a little disappointed about that), but I was incredibly moved by Herzog’s literal and metaphorical descent into one of the most remarkable spaces of human creativity– Chauvet Cave in the Ardeche region of Southern France, where hundreds of paintings of prehistoric predatory beasts drape limestone walls.
Around 32,000 years ago, give or take a millennium, humans entered this series of caves and began painting animals on the inner walls. Over the course of a few thousand years, people used the cave for ceremonies and to do some breathtaking art. However, probably about 25,000 years ago, a massive rockslide permanently sealed off the main ground-level entrance of the cave, and according to every bit of evidence, no human entered until 1994, when three cave explorers, convinced there was something beneath them, dug their way into an opening and crawled down into darkness.
It is that same route Herzog and his four-man film crew take to enter the Chauvet Caves, where they witness what everyone seems to agree is the oldest figurative paintings on earth.
Thankfully, they don’t just witness it; they film it. In 3D.
Much has been made of the use of 3D here. Herzog’s producer joked it is the first time 3D has been used for good, rather than evil. Maybe. Regardless, the dimensionality of the art is one of its most fabulous features, and the augmented contrast facilitated by 3D technology really does make a difference.
For example, one unique feature of these paintings is the fact that the artists scraped away the face of the rock where they were going to paint, making the “canvas” smoother and whiter. In other words, they prepared their surface. They also utilized the curves and contours of the cave walls to help accentuate a horse’s flank or the protruding horn of a rhino. Similarly, the artists would often etch details into the wall either to delineate the outline of the animal or to call attention to an animal’s features. These create shadows when a torch is passed in front of the painting, further creating depth of field and motion.
For me, the most remarkable aesthetic gestures are the instances when the artists engage in what we can only assume is the earliest form of animation. Note in the image below how you can see fainter images of the same rhinoceros, as though it is moving forward. This desire to accurately depict motion as opposed to stasis moves the paintings from mere chronicle to illustration. It’s pure imagination. It’s re-creation. It’s genius.
Herzog is obsessed by the notion that these paintings represent the birth of the modern human. Here, for Herzog, is where the human spirit *begins*. It is the earliest record of the human desire to make art, to create beauty, and to try to understand the world in pictorial, non-rational ways.
How much you like the film will depend on how much you like hearing Herzog’s voice, in its overly dramatic German accent–at times verging on camp–narrating both the images and his awe. “These are the memories of forgotten dreams,” he says at one point. His fondness for the existentialist aphorism can be a bit much. He overplays his hand on a few occasions, trying way too hard to make his own philosophical profundity commensurate with the profundity of the paintings. I could have done without this. I want the art to do its own work; I don’t need Herzog to help me with their depth.
At times Herzog acts as though he knows what the artists were thinking thirty millennia ago. That’s unlikely. I like Herzog a great deal, and I generally love his movies, but his philosopher-cum-shaman persona (in this film at least) is unnecessary.
While he might be unnecessary from a narrative perspective, he is wholly necessary for seeing the caves. So, we must thank him for that. It is doubtful anyone reading this will ever visit Chauvet in person. It’s guarded tighter than Fort Knox. Herzog himself only got a few hours a day inside. He had to use cold lights powered by battery packs worn on belts. The camera crew is often in the frame, and even Herzog has to carry a light. This limitation is actually an advantage because the light moves over the images slowly, sort of recreating the effect of passing a torch over the walls. The images reveal themselves in light and in shadow. They do seem dreamlike, both alive and not.
In truth, the film is two films–one about the amazing paintings inside the cave–and the other about the projects surrounding its protection. To be sure, he could have done an entire film highlighting the oddball characters the cave attracts, like the guy wearing reindeer skin who plays the “Star-Spangled Banner” on a bone flute or the master perfumer who claim to find caves merely by sniffing. I want less of these dudes and more of the art, but you can’t blame Werner for being distracted by the whimsical.
What no one seems to be talking about is how the caves function as one of the earliest–perhaps the earliest–examples of public art. In one astonishing scene, Herzog describes two overlapping images of the same animal–one facing one way, the other facing the opposite. The back halves of their bodies make a kind of charcoal Venn diagram on the limestone wall. But then Herzog explains that carbon dating reveals that the to animals, which look exactly alike, were painted over 5,000 apart. An animal stood alone, on a wall, chalked in black for 5,000 years. Then, after a span of time twice as long as between us and Homer, another anonymous artist arrives to finish the collaboration. In what is probably Herzog’s best moment in the film, he observes that while we are tied to history, these artists were not.
Chauvet is like a sculpture garden, a graffiti wall, a series of murals. And watching this film like seeing murals or street art in Chartes. The caves hum with a silent holiness that is somehow beyond language and time.