Cave of Forgotten Dreams

I walked out of Sundance last week after having watched Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams both in awe of the Cave of Chauvet featured in the movie and angry at myself for not having gone to Chicago to see it in 3-D. The lesson here is to assume the movies I really want to see won't make it to Madison.

The Cave of Chauvet is in southern France and was discovered by a trio of spelunkers in 1994. Jean-Marie Chauvet was the leader of the group or did the bulk of the work or something because the cave bears his name. They discovered a draft emanating from the cliff which gave them their first clue. Some digging later they exposed the mouth to the cave which had been covered in a rock fall for tens of thousands of years. Once inside they found some exquisitely preserved cave painting.

With the discovery reported, the French government sealed the cave and today entrance is through a steel door which makes that part of the cliff look a bit like the fortress on Navarone. Access to the cave is very limited but Herzog managed to get permission to film. He and his small crew had only a short amount of time to get their footage but they seem to have made the best of it.

When I first saw the charcoal drawings on the wall, I marveled at how well they were preserved as they are somewhere in the neighborhood of 32,000 years old. But that was soon replaced by more complex sense of awe when I contemplated that people made those drawings. What were the lives of these people like? What did the drawings mean to them?

While we'll never really know the answers to these questions, it sure is fun to have Werner Herzog speculating on the answers. His narration is a joy in all of his documentaries. Herzog's near monotone is almost plaintive with its thick German accent. He keeps some distance between his subject and himself and ponders what kind of truths can be culled from the subject onscreen. In Cave of Forgotten Dreams he views the drawings as messages from the past to the future and stands in awe of them. One drawing features a bison with eight legs and another has four consecutive drawings of a horse's head. Herzog views these particular drawings as representative of movement and labels them examples of "proto-cinema". He imagines how the images would have appeared to our Paleolithic ancestors by torchlight.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams is a departure from Herzog's more recent documentary work and indeed from a lot of his narrative work. There's no cruel and uncaring universe mocking the futility of existence and our lives ephemeral. Instead he marvels at the ur-art in Chauvet and lets the marvel of the archaeologists and paleontologists who work inside the cave shine through too as they explain their findings. But no Herzog work is complete without some unconventional characters. One archaeologist who works with the cave and its drawings used to work in a circus. This man was also plagued by dreams of lions after seeing the drawings of them in the cave. A mighty testament to the power of the art there. Another is dressed in skins and demonstrates a replica of a pre-historic bone flute found at another site but dating to roughly the same time. And then there's the perfumer who is brought in to sniff the air of the cave so it can replicated at a theme park simulacrum of the place.

While Herzog is convinced that the cave contains communications from the past, he isn't sure what they say. One scientist posits that the paintings are a manifestation of the human desire to communicate. Perhaps this is Herzog's injection of futility. Two parties want to communicate with one another but tens of thousands of years have left them unable to do so. There's a coda in which we learn of a tropical refuge not too distant from the cave that was created with the heated waste water of a nearby nuclear power plant. As we watch albino alligators swim about, Herzog wonders what they would make of the paintings. This sequence felt superfluous but it reinforced his questions about the message from the past. Things change and meanings get lost in the drift of time.

If this is Herzog pointing out yet another example of futility in the human experience, it takes a back seat to the wonder of the cave and all that lies inside. For those not inclined to hear his imagination running in the narration, Cave of Forgotten Dreams is still worthwhile to see what's inside the cave. Despite have a small crew and minimal equipment, the footage is amazing. In addition to the drawings, there are lots of bones and some of them have been covered in calcite over thousands of years. In one corner are the footprints of a boy right next to those of a wolf. Plus there's one particular stone covered in the handprints of one individual. He dipped his hand in some kind of red dye and put his print all over one section of rock. Why would he do this? Was it the artist signing his work?

While we'll never know what the Paleolithic people were trying to say, Herzog is surely communicating to his audience the wonder he experienced inside the cave and that the human desire to communicate through imagination and artistry is age-old and will be with us for a long time to come.