CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS

US, 2011, 95 minutes, Colour.
Directed by Werner Herzog

Cave of Forgotten Dreams is an evocative title for any film. It reminds us that we are people of imagination, stories and images lurking just below the surface of our consciousness or buried much deeper, coming to light unexpectedly. They can be both creative and destructive. Philosophers like Plato speculated on reality and images through images on a cave wall.

German director Werner Herzog (resident in the United States for some time) has been a film-maker who has explored many a forgotten dream in an almost five decades career of offbeat film-making. He recreated the angry, passionate dreams of the conquistador, Aguirre the Wrath of God. He filmed the ambitious dream of a latterday artistic conquistador who wants to build an opera house but has to haul a boat over South American mountains, Fitzcarraldo. Dreams are Herzog’s staple.

For some time, he has been making documentaries and this is his latest. Even his documentary choices have been maverick: Kuwaiti oil fields aflame (Lessons of Darkness), the death of a couple who lived amongst grizzlies in Alaska (Grizzly Man), his visit to Antarctica (Encounters at the End of the World) and many more. Then he surprises everyone by making American films, even police thrillers, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done and the remake of Bad Lieutenant.

This time he is far more straightforward (at least until the final twenty minutes), filming a solidly interesting documentary about the primeval paintings discovered in the French caves in the valley of the Ardeche in 1994. The Chauvet Pont-d’ Arc Cave (named after one of the discoverers), is a vast cave, blocked at its entrance thousands of years ago, preserving the art and many fossilised bones. Carbon dating indicates that they are more than 30,000 years old. The film was made in collaboration with History Films.
The paintings exhibit some sophistication: walls scraped for better surfaces for the art, etching as well as incising around some of the figures.

It is Herzog himself who speaks the narration. On the whole, it is surprisingly objective most of the time, a tone of respect and wonder and straightforward communication of information and what it was like for him and his crew to be allowed into the caves and the methods and difficulties of filming (especially the light).

Since the preservation of the art work is important - and there are dangers (as has happened in other caves) of deterioration because of atmospheric effects (and tourist breathing) - it means that the caves are quite off limits except to scientists, palaeontologists and other specialists. Herzog received a privileged permit in being allowed access to film. With the limits of a crew of four and with small cameras, he has captured the majesty and beauty of the caverns, the great stalactites and stalagmites, and offers his audience ample opportunity to contemplate the long-trapped paintings.

There are a great number of interviews to explain the history raising and all kinds of scientific questions. After 90 minutes, we have a fairly good grasp of the caves and their treasures, even though we would not pass an immediate exam after the film.
It is said that there are thirteen different species of animals, principally horses, on the walls of the caves. While most of the interviews attempt to give informed data about the caves and paintings (with references to other parallel paintings like those of Australian aborigines), there are some locals and eccentrics who offer some Herzog-like interpretations and speculations.
The film has been shot in 3D processes. While this does not make a great deal of difference in the early part of the film (except for shots of the crags and ravines in the magnificent remote landscapes), it comes into its own in the latter part where Herzog simply photographs the paintings, roving over them, meandering, just as we might gaze at them, focusing on one, turning our gaze to another and then repeating our looking with moments of contemplation.

But, just before the end Herzog goes into Herzog mode, trying for some mystical and transcendental meanings (not a bad thing in itself). At best Herzog’s reflections are evocative, suggesting that we think into the lives of the painters and what this artistic output meant to them. He wonder what these discoveries and investigations could mean for us as we think about human nature, its development and capacity for survival over millennia. Herzog has always been eclectic so many of his comments are random and idiosyncratic. Sometimes they are more than slightly oddball as he expresses them (albino crocodiles and other symbols included). But, maybe, as we have time to meditate before the paintings, our own imaginings and thoughts might be poetic and oddball about these ancient painters and their lives.

Herzog suggests, in a playfully serious voice, that these images are ‘proto-cinema’.

We can certainly be grateful for this cinematic service in Herzog’s revealing the caves and the art to us.