- Location: Century Boulder
- Regardless of how you feel about Werner Herzog's films, you have to give the man credit for his audacity. Whether he's carting film crews to Antarctica or hauling steamships through the Amazon rainforest, Herzog's bold vision always completely suffuses his work. In the case of Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Herzog's newest documentary, that vision involves nothing less ambitious than filming the origins of human art and culture in three dimensions. I'll admit that I entered the film wondering "How exciting can cave paintings be, and why would you need to film them in 3D?" Readers, I exited the film a true believer.
- Under Herzog's direction and accompanied by Ernst Reijseger's sublime musical score, entering the Chauvet Cave feels like stepping into the most holy of cathedrals. As we quickly learn from Herzog and the science crew that accompanies him, the paintings found within this avalanche-buried cavern are an estimated 30,000 years old, give or take a few thousand years. To provide some perspective, most of Europe back then was covered by mile-high glaciers, and the English channel was dry enough to cross on foot. The local fauna consisted of some familiar animals, including antelopes, deer, rhinoceroses, and horses, but there was also an abundance of now long-extinct cave bears, mammoths, and maneless lions. In fact, much of what we know about these animals comes from the skeletons scattered all across the cave floor and, of course, the paintings.
- About those paintings. It's difficult to put into words why they're so engrossing, which is presumably why Herzog saw fit to devote an entire film to them. The artistic style is relatively simple, naturally, but the bright light of intelligence shines from behind these humble strokes. Horses are represented with multiple legs to convey the sense of motion as they stampede around the contours of the curved cave walls. A single, recognizable artist splats dozens of handprints on walls that in earlier times were etched upon by cave bears. A large stalactite displays the cave's single human form, a fertile female who merges seamlessly with a hoofed creature. So why did these early painters create these images? Suggestions abound, mostly having to do with religious ceremonies, but perhaps the clearest answer in the film is that we will never know.
- As in his other documentaries, Herzog occasionally interrupts his own story, with odd asides into pre-historic German sculpture and Fred Astaire's shadow, the usual strange philosophical pronouncements ("Nothing is real"), and an incredibly atonal coda on nuclear albino crocodiles. On the other hand, his preternatural gift for sniffing out interesting stories turns up characters like the cave-hunting perfumer and the circus acrobat-turned-anthropologist, not to mention the devoted group of researchers who surround him. Additionally, Herzog is to be complimented on his use of two very impressive technologies. The first is the "helicam" that glides up sheer rock faces and coasts along the surface of a river, going places that no helicopter could ever go. The second, of course, is filming in 3D. Cave of Forgotten Dreams is a great movie for people, especially professional film reviewers, who think that there is never any reason to access that extra dimension. Lord knows that there have been plenty of recent blockbusters in which 3D only made a bad movie worse, but here we have a counterexample. The dreams behind these images may be long forgotten, but their textures jump out of the screen and ingrain themselves in our minds and souls.
