Werner Herzog and his three-man film crew explore Chauvet Cave in "Cave of Forgotten Dreams."
(Werner Herzog, 2010)
August 21, 2011
by Joel Crary
“It is as if the modern human soul had awakened here.”
“Cave of Forgotten Dreams” is a compelling example of movie-making. Granted access to Chauvet Cave by the French government, director Werner Herzog took along a three-man crew, working the lights himself. Toxic gases in the chambers necessitated short trips over six days. Herzog chose to film in 3-D, using specially built cameras that oftentimes required on-the-spot assembly. Folks familiar with Herzog know that that’s something he’d do: take a gimmick usually reliant on big, open shoots, reliable lighting, and computer effects and stick it into a remote, fragile venue that forbids hot lamps and the ability to move around freely.
We’ve only known about Chauvet Cave since 1994, when it was discovered by speleologists Eliette Brunel-Deschamps, Christian Hillaire, and Jean-Marie Chauvet. Finding it must have shaken them to the core. It contains the oldest-known cave drawings, dating back some 32,000 years, and had been been sealed off for millennia by a landslide. Imagine encountering it, the great care and pains taken to gain an understanding without disrupting it. The crew sticks to two-foot-wide walkways, preventing them from treading on the calcite-coated ground. Every square inch of the cave has been mapped with lasers, and there’s been discussion of replicating it as a theme park attraction for the general public, who will never make it past the giant steel door at the entrance.
The researchers posit that since the cave includes no evidence that people dwelled within, they rather used the space purely for painting, and possibly religious ceremonies. The walls boast pictures of horses, rhinos, mammoths, and wolves, along with claw marks made by bears long deceased. Some of the drawings offer striking detail, including primitive shading techniques. Some suggest movement via side-by-side replications, which Herzog dubs “proto-cinema” and compares to animation cells. Yet another shows the form of a woman, the only representation of a human, bonded with an animal. One of the more astounding facts is gleaned from radiocarbon dating results, which suggest that certain overlapping paintings were done 5,000 years apart from each other. That bends the brain. Picture Banksy painting over an original work of Michaelangelo’s, and then a civilization in the year 25000 AD trying to understand the implications.
“Cave of Forgotten Dreams” serves as a meditation on the birth of human creation and the cold fact of our inability to fully comprehend the purpose and meaning of Paleolithic works of art. The 3-D cameras bring the contours and crevices of the cave to life; there were moments when I caught myself trying to physically look around outcrops. What really struck me, though, was the amount of depth the technique afforded. Herzog and his crew were able to put their limited resources to ingenious use in order to lend a veritable sense of the cave’s length and breadth. Aerial shots of the region are also employed, and the ever-playful director gives us a look at how this was accomplished using a remote-controlled helicopter.
Herzog loves to muse on the nature of humankind, and his approach suits the material. As he did in “Encounters at the End of the World,” he wisely decides to examine the people who dedicate their lives to the craft of exploration and overturns eccentricities in line with his own. One speleologist reveals his former life as a circus performer. Another displays his personal method of quite literally sniffing out caves by sticking his nose in between rocks and judging the odour. Another regales Herzog of what she’s come to believe are the stories behind the paintings. “You can hear the horns of the animals colliding,” she explains over one rhinoceros portrait.
Who’s to say if her perceptions are correct? It’s human nature to explain away the unexplainable. Many shots in the film feature only the paintings, scored by orchestral music meant to stress advances and parallels in artistic expression. Other shots are accompanied by little more than a heartbeat, with Herzog imploring us to judge ourselves within these near-mythical surroundings and absorb the enormity of being able to look directly at the past and not understand it entirely. He closes the film with images of mutant albino alligators, the result of a nearby biosphere fuelled by nuclear runoff. Life as we know it changes all the time, and will continue to change in ways we can’t possibly foresee. What will the future make of our voices?
