On a Top 100 list that threatens top-heaviness with clergy, saints, and organized religion, Cave of Forgotten Dreams is a welcome outlier. Its writer/director, Werner Herzog, professes no interest in God or religion, except as a subject for cultural exploration, a manifestation of our humanity.
Yet his films, across a career spanning almost 60 years, are suffused with elements typically associated with spirituality: wonder, curiosity, awe, beauty, compassion. A unitary theme across his 50+ features and documentaries is poetic speculation on what it means to be human in an indifferent universe. Sometimes this involves deranged protagonists who try – and fail – to break the envelope of humanity’s limitations (Fitzcarraldo, Grizzly Man, My Best Fiend). Other films contemplate humanity’s more beneficent outliers: a POW camp escapee (Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Rescue Dawn), a man who brought down totalitarianism from the inside (Meeting Gorbachev), or the misfits who shake out of prosaic society and land in Antarctica (Encounters at the End of the World).
So, to allow the making of Cave of Forgotten Dreams, it seems fitting that the French Ministry of Culture permitted this self-described poet, this student of culture and humanity, to film inside the Chauvet Cave, the site of the earliest known figurative paintings. It seems equally fitting that the cast of characters in Herzog’s documentary includes a circus juggler turned archaeologist and a perfume-maker trying to sniff out more hidden caves in the Ardèche region of southern France.
The epoch when Chauvet’s walls were painted – 32,000 years ago – is a period when Homo sapiens’ imagination, artistry, and spirituality exploded onto the scene. Besides the hundreds of paintings scattered along the cave’s 1300 foot length is also what appears to be an altar facing its entrance. In addition, Herzog’s film shows us contemporaneous sculpture and musical instruments unearthed elsewhere in Europe.
Since it was discovered in 1994, access to Chauvet Cave has been strictly limited, to preclude it from suffering the same fate as Lascaux, where tourists’ exhalations led to mold deposits and discoloration. As such, Herzog and his crew of three were only granted six four-hour sessions to do their filming. Their equipment was restricted to items they could hand-carry, and they were forbidden to stray from metal walkways a mere two feet wide.
Despite these proscriptions, their images are nothing short of breathtaking. One semicircular portion surrounding a pool portrays numerous overlapping horses, as if they were preparing to lap up the water. Another wall is speckled with dozens of red handprints; as an archaeologist points out, they were made by the same person with a uniquely crooked pinkie finger. Among the 13 painted animal species are lions, aurochs, wooly rhinos, mammoths, bears – and one single human female torso, mysteriously overlapping with a bison head.
As is typical for a Herzog documentary, he chooses his onscreen experts with care, both for their distinctive personalities and their ability to communicate knowledge clearly and enthusiastically. An artist/archaeologist duo holds up six graphics, demonstrating sequentially how five artists and one cave bear contributed to one wall’s artwork and claw scratches across millennia. (Some neighboring paintings are separated in time by 5000 years, as if Salvador Dali had painted over Sumerian cuneiform.) Another scientist directs us to example after example of the intimate knowledge the artists had of their animal subjects: horses winded from running, a lioness growling at a lusty male; a pair of rhinos bracing for combat.
Herzog discerningly mixes up his presentation of cave art. Besides the expert voiceover, Herzog himself describes a bison, painted with eight legs to convey running, as “proto-cinema.” Other portions of Cave of Forgotten Dreams are shown silently, still others to the accompaniment of a subtle heartbeat or Ernst Reijseger’s musical score. The camera lingers on paintings, allowing time for contemplation. Sometimes the light source moves slowly, mimicking the effect of flickering firelight.
Cave of Forgotten Dreams is arguably the only film in cinema history that demanded 3D shooting. Since the painters used the walls’ contours to give their animals mass, shape, and dimensionality, the 3D format is essential for our appreciation of these elements.
Scenes outside the cave give space for postulation upon Cro-Magnon spirituality, which likely involved beliefs in fluidity (transformation between human, animal, and plant forms) and permeability (no barrier between the material and spiritual realms). Yet, Herzog and the archaeologists speak just as candidly about what is unknowable and likely to always remain so. As the documentary’s title signifies, the painters’ dreams and emotions are beyond our grasp.
Reijseger’s music highlights this temporal gap, his organ and choral parts having a Renaissance flavor, the overlaid meandering cello unsettlingly contemporary. And would it be a Herzog film without a memorable role for animals? In a postscript that transports us 20 miles from Chauvet, albino alligators flourish in an artificial biosphere generated by a nuclear reactor’s coolant pools. To use one of Herzog’s phrases from early in the film, we are scarcely better equipped than these reptiles to posit ourselves in the “familiar but distant universe” of our prehistoric ancestors.
– Andrew Spitznas, chief writer/editor at Secular Cinephile
- Directed by: Werner Herzog
- Produced by:
- Written by: Werner Herzog Judith Thurman
- Music by: Ernst Reijseger
- Cinematography by: Peter Zeitlinger
- Editing by: Joe Bini Maya Hawke
- Release Date: 2010
- Running Time: 90 min
- Language: English, German, French
Arts & Faith Lists:
2020 Top 100 — #59