Dreaming of deep history

A landslide hermetically sealed what would become known as the Chauvet Cave some 20,000 years ago, preserving its contents in a sort of natural time capsule. Among these contents are paintings which carbon dating tells us are roughly 32,000 years old—by far the oldest works of art in the world. The cave was discovered in 1994 when explorers found air shafts along its nearby cliffs. Because of the delicate atmospheric conditions needed to maintain the integrity of its contents, access to Chauvet has been restricted to a handful of scientists, with very few exceptions. It is our great fortune that one of those exceptions was made for Werner Herzog and his skeleton crew.

It is difficult to put into words why so much in Cave of Forgotten Dreams is so immensely moving. Obviously, that we’re seeing manmade images of such unfathomable vintage is itself deeply impressive, but the sophistication of the paintings goes far beyond crude representation: they elegantly envelop the undulations of the cave’s walls; they convey decidedly personal impressions of the beasts they depict, and sometimes imply movement through repetition; one image of a cave lion is drawn with a single, six-foot-long brush stroke. The genuine artfulness of these paintings prompted Herzog to make his film not merely a document of some extraordinary discovery, but to use it as a platform for speculating on the dreams of its Stone Age authors, whom he imagines as envisioning “the landscape as operatic event,” and whom he aligns with both the German Romanticists and cinema’s forefathers.

One of the most remarkable works Herzog encounters is a palimpsest, with one layer being painted some 5,000 years after the first. In a sense, Herzog’s film is another layer to this collaboration that stretches across millennia, evoking a poetry and sensuality unique to its form, and making the most relevant use of 3D technology I’ve ever seen. Organ and cello music heighten our sense of having entered an ancient cathedral. Spotlights from the crew’s headlamps move like fireflies across stone and stalagmites and the places where calcites have rendered the cave floor into a rink of glistening wax. In the most spellbinding passages, Herzog’s informative, characteristically eccentric running voice-over falls silent, leaving only Ernst Reijseger's haunting score on the soundtrack, and his light panels move across the paintings like a caress, echoing the torches held by those who came before. The result is a feeling of intense intimacy.

There’s more, of course, to Cave of Forgotten Dreams than just the cave itself. As with Encounters at the End of the World, Herzog is also very interested in the people who have gathered from many places and disciplines to work in and around Chauvet. Most memorably, he speaks with a scientist and former circus juggler who confesses that during his initial visits to Chauvet he had alarmingly vivid dreams of lions every night and needed time away from the cave to recover. It’s one of those things you might imagine the mischievous Herzog scripting for his subject, but the truth is that, after seeing this film, it’s actually hard to imagine spending time in Chauvet and not being haunted by primordial visions, by things lodged deep in the psyche, rarely awakened, and beyond language. Do see this movie.

TIFF '10: Into the past

I’m not really sure if dreams can be either forgotten or remembered, or if the best we can do is extrapolate on some lone fragment caught in the mind’s net as we ascend from the depths of sleep. Mere shadows. Such extrapolation lies at the heart of Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams, which had its world premiere last night at the 35th Toronto International Film Festival. The power went out in the entire building twice during the screening, causing the movie to suddenly vanish before our goggled eyes and only after some minutes pick up again. I don’t know that these technology-defying interruptions hurled any of us back into the Stone Age exactly, but it did somehow feel part of the show, bringing the fleeting nature of our viewing experience into relief by weighing it against Herzog’s haunting, at times unspeakably moving images of 30,000 year old cave paintings. It also gave Herzog an added opportunity to work his customary showmanship, standing up during one of the pauses to assure us all that this was the first time the deluxe, ultra-modern Bell Lightbox, which opened only the day previous, had ever projected in 3D! He was also quite proud of the fact that the movie had apparently been finished only 15 hours previous.


The 3D is actually fairly subtle in Cave of Forgotten Dreams, and I wonder if the movie wouldn’t be just as stunning without it, but it’s nevertheless the finest use of the technology I’ve seen, partly because the depth of field is already fairly limited once we’re moving through the narrow cavities. Though in many ways it picks up from where Encounters at the End of the World left off, using images of landscapes most of us never see as a way to contemplate time on an overwhelmingly vast scale, the movie feels somewhat closer to straight documentary for Herzog, perhaps because of his humbling reverence for what it is he’s been able to see and capture. He was given a very limited number of hours to work in the Chauvet Cave, which holds what are by a long shot the world’s oldest painted images, and which the French government rightfully offers few people access to. The space was such that he and his crew had to assemble their own custom-designed 3D cameras, sometimes improvising them right there on the spot. There are paintings that overlap each other that were made 5,000 years apart. There are images of bison with eight legs and rhino with multiple horns, which for Herzog resemble a kind of proto-cinema in their suggestion of movement. Not unusually for Herzog, the movie takes a decidedly meandering path, yet there’s nothing in its path that you’d want to rush. Ernst Reijseger’s gorgeous, silver-smoke music lulls us into a spell of looking, dreaming, forgotten who were are. Herzog interviews a scientist and former circus juggler who confessed that after his first experiences in the Chauvet Cave he had dreams every night of lions, both real and painted. They were so overwhelming he had to take a break from his work. Perhaps if enough of us see this landmark work we’ll all be having the same dreams, whether we remember them or not.