Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
7/14/11
No
other filmmaker has had a career quite like Werner Herzog. The acclaimed
auteur has directed critically-beloved flicks like Aguirre, The Wrath
of God, Rescue Dawn and the 1979 Nosferatu
remake, and his eccentricities and willingness to do anything for a shot
(like, for instance, drag a ship over a mountain) were highlighted in the
1982 documentary Burden of Dreams. But Herzog has actually
produced far more documentaries (most famously Grisly Man) than
fictional narratives in his five-decade career, docs he presides over them
like the Michael Moore of existential inquiry. So, leave it to this
fairly unique trailblazer to create the very first non-IMAX documentary
in 3D: Cave of Forgotten Dreams affords him unprecedented
access to France’s Chauvet Caves and the world’s oldest collection of primitive
cave art. I didn’t get to see Forgotten Dreams in all its
3D glory (I doubt much of anyone outside of the major markets did), but
even in the more familiar dimensions it’s a visually arresting trip to
a place none of us is ever going to be allowed to go to see some truly
amazing sights. It takes a fair amount of padding to get this cave
tour up to 90 minutes, and sometimes Herzog’s Big Ideas get the better
of him. But it’s a movie anyone with an interest in art or history
should enjoy, and some of those Big Ideas are pretty fascinating.
In
1994, three cave hunters discovered an enclosure in Southern France that
housed an astonishing collection of ancient fossils and cave paintings
so perfectly preserved by a cave-in that, despite being twice as old as
any others known to exist, they look like they were painted yesterday.
The site is closed to all but a few scientists, and Werner Herzog persuades
the French government to allow him to accompany them inside to observe
their work, and later to film the caves with his own four-man crew.
The group can only work for four hours a day with limited lighting and
must remain on carefully constructed metal ramps to avoid damaging the
site. We speak to experts in all sorts of fields from art to ancient
weapons and cave mapping, and muse about what separated the people who
created these remarkable paintings from the Neanderthals who they would
ultimately outcompete and how much of their artistic spirit remains alive
in us today. Mutant crocodiles also turn up.
The
Chauvet Caves (named for the senior of those three explorers) are certainly
something to behold, defying all of our preconceptions about cave painting
by being both artistically rich (the artists used multiple legs and horns
to simulate movement under the light of flickering torches, not unlike
stone-age 3D) and crammed together like a wall of ancient graffiti (one
image includes two overlapping paintings done 5,000 years apart).
The use of shading brings some of the images to striking life, and Herzog
wisely keeps going back to the best of them, a mural of four horse heads
that couldn’t be improved on by any modern artist and seemed to be the
go-to Chauvet image everywhere I went online to read up on the caves after
seeing the movie. Art experts explain to us how the painters used
the contours of the cave walls and the effect of viewing them by torch
light (no paintings were done in the part of the structure that was touched
by sunlight before the cave-in) to enhance their work, and also demonstrate
how images painted at varying times both compliment and compete with the
ones that surround them.
Herzog
doesn’t make the scientists stand out as individuals as much as I wish
he would have, since the movie’s best moments aside from ogling the paintings
(which takes no more than 15 minutes of screen time) are those when they
reveal their quirky personalities. One (I did some research, but
couldn’t match names to who I’d seen on-screen) shows how he finds caves
with his sense of smell rather than conventional means and another demonstrates
a wicked primitive bow-launching device… which he’s not very good at using.
The most entertaining of the experts is a former circus performer-turned-cave
mapper who is always a bit off balance because Herzog is always ready with
a follow-up to all his answers, pressing him for existential breakdowns
of what were sometimes clearly just boilerplate responses. The give-and-take
between them is pretty amusing, while most of the other experts are simply
filmed as the kind of talking heads you’d expect on the movie’s eventual
home, The History Channel (which co-financed).
But
Herzog isn’t content to simply teach us about caves or primitive cultures.
He’s much more interested in the “dawn of the modern soul”, when people
started not just creating art, but creating imaginative art. One
of the images on the walls is a female minotaur, and prehistoric art experts
from across Europe show us other examples of the oldest-known representations
of things that don’t really exist. I also enjoyed watching one of
them play the Star Spangled Banner on an ancient flute. The movie
is full of juxtapositions like that, challenging us to put ourselves in
the painters’ shoes or imagining them in ours, always aware that their
surviving art is all that remains of what they had to say about the world.
As Herzog tells that circus guy, you’ll never know the dreams of a city’s
people by reading the phone book they left behind. But you might
be able to guess them if you saw a collection of their paintings.
As
I mentioned, mutant crocodiles also make an appearance, because Herzog’s
never met a lizard he didn’t want to stare down (as fans of Bad
Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans can attest) and also because
their story is intriguing enough to merit its own short-subject documentary.
Cave of Forgotten Dreams might have played better at 2/3 of its
running time, but it’s consistently interesting, in no small part because
you’re not going to see anything like it any time soon. Credit also
goes to Ernst Reijseger’s haunting score. And, of course, to some
long-dead artists who really knew how to put a rhino on a curving stone
wall, something that probably plays even better in 3D. |
