Review by Bud Moore
Featuring Werner Herzog, Dominique Baffier, Jean Clottes,
Jean-Michel Geneste, Carole Fritz, Gilles Tosello, Wulf Hein,
Michel Philippe, Julien Monney, Nicholas Conard
Written by Werner Herzog & Judith Thurman
Certification UK U
Runtime 82 minutes
Directed by Werner Herzog
The Cave of Forgotten Dreams is both a very real place and a very metaphorical place. It exists in Chauvet caves in southern France, in the mind of Werner Herzog and within us all. Herzog has given himself the mission of exploring something which at the time of writing is the oldest known manifestation of human beings creating art. Using state of the art 3D cameras Herzog takes us into the caves, which are protected under French law and only ever seen by the geologists and anthropologists who care for and study them.
Rather than using a rigid documentary format, Herzog as ever searches for what he calls the ecstatic truth. He asks France's most famous truffle hunter to smell the cave and imagine what the artists would have felt, seen and believed as they painted the horses, bears, bison and the mammoths that roamed the Europe of the 30,000 years ago. He asks us to look inside the mind of the albino crocodiles and imagine how they think of art. Are the cave paintings as alien to them as our ancestors from the Upper Palaeolithic era are to us? What did the animals they painted mean to these people? Were they gods, did they think of them as family or food, how did they rationalise and structure the world around them. These are the questions that would pass through our minds if we ever had the chance to visit the caves, something we'll never be able to do.
Which is very much the point of filming them, and particularly filming the in 3D. While there are some very pointless 3D shots in the film, exaggerated vanishing points, and people standing a metre in front of the camera, with people walking 50 metres behind them, it is justified by the caves themselves. Where you can take in the curvature that has suggested the head of a horse, or a small nook that seems to be a shrine for the creature that has been immortalised there. As well as the monumental stalagmites that populate the cave that look eternal but are actually only half the age of the oldest painting.
Herzog's greatest strength as a film maker is his tenacity, which is one of the reasons he's made nearly 50 films over a forty year career. Many film makers have been refused permission to film in the Chauvet caves since their discovery in 1994 and initially he was, and it was only his insistence of becoming an employee of the French government, taking a salary of one euro a year, and paying tax on it that got him permission for the project. It seems somehow fitting that someone who has spent most of their adult life dreaming up images and re-imaging narrative film with his savants, insect colonies, dwarves, opera houses in jungles and beautiful deapan, cynical other worldly narration should be the only person who'll ever be allowed to film the first images that were ever put on a wall for others to contemplate.