Few directors, living or dead, are as visionary and idiosyncratic as Werner Herzog. The German auteur specializes in highly original films filled with searing, fever-dream imagery and tales of obsessed men with grand but insane ambitions.
So, at first glance, making a film about a subject as prosaic as art history — much less one shot in gimmicky 3-D — would seem like a departure for Herzog. But that’s exactly what he does in Cave of Forgotten Dreams, a documentary about the paintings of the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc cave. And as it turns out, his style is a perfect fit.
The Chauvet cave is a series of caverns in southern France that contain some of the most important works of Stone Age cave painting in the world, dating back more than 30,000 years. The artwork is remarkably well-preserved, thanks to a rockslide that sealed the cave 20 millennia ago, protecting the paintings from air flow and weather.
Since Chauvet’s discovery in 1994, the French government has taken great care to maintain the pristine condition of the artwork. Virtually no one besides a small team of archaeologists is allowed in or out of the cave, and even they have to follow strict precautions, such as sticking to a narrow metal walkway within the cave.
In fact, Herzog’s cameras are the first to be allowed into the cave, making Cave of Forgotten Dreams a significant art history event itself. Art nerds will not be disappointed. Herzog includes plenty of interviews with experts in the field who provide plenty of insight into the details of the paintings.
But you don’t need to have aced AP Art History to appreciate the film. Any layman can see the paintings are simply spectacular, and Herzog does a typically wonderful job capturing them.
There are long stretches containing nothing but atmospheric music and footage of the artwork, but they never drag. On the contrary, they’re among the strongest scenes in the film.
The 3-D is actually used quite well. It not only contributes to the visuals, it actually becomes essential. It may be the best use of 3-D ever, and it’s certainly the most subtle.
For long sections of the film, the 3-D adds nothing. During interviews, for instance, it just lies there, hardly noticeable. During one section, Herzog’s first visit to the cave, he is allowed only a camcorder, and the 3-D effect is completely lost.
It’s during those long sections when the film falls into a reverie, lingering over the art, that the 3-D becomes so potent. As one expert points out, the paintings themselves are in 3-D: The artists used the curvature of the surfaces to add perspective and indicate motion. To film in 2-D would have been to deprive the audience of the true experience of the art.
As with many of Herzog’s documentaries, Cave of Forgotten Dreams is filled with strange characters. A few choice examples are the German archeologist who dresses in reindeer skins and plays “The Star-Spangled Banner” on a reconstructed prehistoric flute and the Albert Einstein-lookalike who produces a large spear and cheerfully informs the camera, “I will try to show you how to kill a horse.”
The film ends up fitting nicely into Herzog’s canon and forms a thematic trilogy with 2005’s Grizzly Man and 2007’s Encounters at the End of the World, Herzog’s two most recent documentaries. All three documentaries explore the relationship between humanity and the natural world, a theme the director has returned to frequently throughout his career.
Grizzly Man was about the current state of the relationship, in which restless men such as bear expert Timothy Treadwell are drawn to the wild but find themselves utterly unprepared to face it. Encounters at the End of the World was about the future of the human-nature relationship, which, in Herzog’s dark view, will result in ecological catastrophe and eventually humanity’s extinction.
If Cave of Forgotten Dreams is the weakest of the three, that’s only because the first two set the bar so high. It doesn’t have the near-Shakespearean tragedy of Grizzly Man or the portentousness of Encounters at the End of the World, but what it does have is the rarest of qualities in Herzog’s world: hope.
Cave of Forgotten Dreams is the origin story. It’s about much more than cave paintings; it’s about how humanity began to differentiate itself from nature. The cave is from the era when Homo sapiens started to make art and music and to think in religious terms. Or, as Herzog puts it, the time was “the beginning of the human soul.”
Is it pretentious? You bet it is. In particular, the epilogue, which features Herzog musing on the symbolism of two albino crocodiles, pushes his erudite opining a bit far and feels like a tacked-on rehash of the message of Encounters at the End of the World.
But don’t let that intimidate you. It’s a beautiful, thoughtful film filled with beautiful imagery. Anything less from Herzog would have been a disappointment.
RATING: 4.5 stars out of 5
diversions@umdbk.com
