David O'ConnellCave of Forgotten Dreams
October 11th 2011 03:19
Rogue filmmaker and lovable eccentric Werner Herzog, his name synonymous with ‘difficult’ projects, has made one of the more important documentaries of his long and storied career with Cave of Forgotten Dreams. In 1994 in the south of France, three explorers, almost by accident, discovered a place buried by history. Their find has provided the modern world with a stupendous insight into our earliest civilisation’s first artistic strokes; a backward gaze across incomprehensible aeons.
Inside what is now known as the Chauvet cave are ancient footprints and bone fragments, but more significantly, eerily accurate drawings of horses, buffaloes and many other beasts still familiar to us today. Remarkably, carbon dating places their origins at around 32,000 years ago. The atmosphere within is delicate, meaning Herzog and his small crew were offered a tiny window only, a finite time in which to investigate this miraculous discovery. The result is, if nothing else, a poignant, haunting historical document.
The imagination reels at the thought of early humans grappling with conceptualisations of the world around them and recording their impressions in this primitive but evocative fashion. Fate certainly played a significant part in the preservation of the cave and entombing them in pristine perfection until now.
The discoverers must have experienced conflicting emotions at the time of cracking open this time capsule - weighing up the privilege of being the first humans alive to see what lay inside against a vague sense of the violation - that committed upon perforating the sanctity of what must have felt like almost sacred terrain.
Herzog commissioned a score from composer Ernst Reijseger’s to accompany his own narration, and it's perhaps a little too reverential at times. Though a compelling composition in its own right, it tends towards overbearing when layered so thickly upon the camera's slowly evolving perusals of the art (evocatively captured in 3D). The significance of their existence is enough to carry any related emotional reaction they inspire.
The repetition of the images later in the film feels almost inevitable; in forging a document of this magnitude and in maximising the precious time allocated to Herzog, the indulgence of such protracted gazing with a languorous attentive eye upon these fascinating drawings is entirely forgivable.
It wouldn’t be a Herzog film without a few eccentric characters or tangential asides. And with that in mind, we have the ‘Postscript’ of Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010), a truly Herzogian touch, relating as it does nearby albino alligators and their self-perception with that of us humans contemplating the thousands of years since the caves were serendipitously sealed.
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