***1/2 Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Written and directed by Werner Herzog.
According to many experts, it's all been downhill for humanity since we abandoned our heritage of hunting and gathering. Hunter-gatherers, after all, led longer, healthier lives than the vast majority of their agricultural descendants. Anthropologists can always tell the difference between the skeleton of a person who grew his food and someone who hunted and gathered it: the ancient farmer always looks weaker, punier, misshapen from years of repetitive, soul-destroying drudgery. "Diseases of affluence" like cancer and diabetes were virtually non-existent among pre-agriculturalists. And they were probably happier too, with more time for leisure activities like sitting around, dancing around campfires--and making more hunter-gatherers.
Now the visionary German director Werner Herzog (Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo, Grizzly Man) wants to convince us that the art was better in those days, too. His Cave of Forgotten Dreams is a look at one of the true masterpieces of painting made in any age. Chauvet Cave in southern France was discovered only in 1994, and has been sealed off from the public ever since in an attempt to save it in something like its pristine state. Herzog is the first filmmaker allowed inside to document the 30,000 year old works within. Not sure it’s worth your time? Then consider this: quite apart from what it affords educationally, his film also offers a nice, cool, subterranean break from the latest carbon-forced heat wave we clever agriculturalists have inflicted on ourselves.
You'd think it would hard to make a movie about what is, in essence, just a fancy mural. In an inspired move, Herzog presents Cave in 3-D, giving the viewer a vivid sense of the space and the undulating surfaces on which the paintings were made. That, and the way Herzog allows his lighting to play upon them like ancient torches, makes this not just an engrossing spectacle, but something like a spiritual experience.
For these images of lions, horses, mammoths etc., executed with a kind of easy, Picasso-esque virtuosity, were not intended just for someone's sensual gratification. They were also visions of an alternative reality, considered so precious by their makers that they were executed in remote places that never saw the ordinary light of day. Herzog--whose logorrheal attempts at profundity are legendary and only occasionally successful--wisely ceases his narration for long stretches here, leaving his crew (and us) the opportunity to absorb the experience in appropriate silence. Indeed, his reverence extends to the point of not even bothering to explain how the paintings were made, or what they're made of--things virtually always addressed in History Channel treatments of prehistoric art. They aren't missed.
In addition to the paintings, the cave is a time capsule of skulls and bones left over from millennia of abandonment. These make the place as much a exhibition of sculpture as of pictures, including hanging "ridge-stones" that flow like frozen drapery and a cave bear skull encased in a layer of calcite resembling sparkling caramel. Here again, the choice to present this film in 3D--perhaps the best use of the technique I can think of--enhances this experience in a way that, say, watching Captain America's mighty shield fly at your head just doesn't.
Are Chauvet's paintings really the all-time pinnacle of picture-making that Herzog suggests they are? Such things are, of course, matters of taste, but for my part the paintings here don't match the dynamism or the colors of Lascaux, let alone (say) the Sistine Chapel, Manet's Water Lilies, or Citizen Kane. Such hyperbole actually does its subject a disservice, for this doesn't need to be "the best" to be uniquely worthwhile. For my part, to spend ninety minutes in the presence of works so ancient, so undoubtedly authentic, is an experience far more profound than anything encompassed by what we call "art" today.
© 2011 Nicholas Nicastro
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