Week 8: Cave of Forgotten Dreams
Dir. Werner Herzog, 2010, 90min
Pleasance Theatre
In 1994, a group of archaeologists in southern France entered a previously unexplored cave containing—alongside the fossils and prints of animals, some of which have gone extinct—the oldest cave paintings ever discovered. After obtaining permission from the French government to take a small crew into the Chauvet Cave, Werner Herzog created this documentary about an ancient artistic achievement he believes could represent nothing less than the birth of the modern human soul.
When these ancestors moved from tale-telling to the recording of their lives and thoughts onto these stone walls they were not as primitive as many might have thought. Archaeologists actually found several techniques for the representation of movement in the paintings. Not only is this the earliest known example of art in human history, it is already concerned not merely with recording the world, but depicting life as it is experienced, and it already possesses a sophistication in doing so.
The recent success of Grizzly Man and Encounters at the End of the World likely has much to do with the fact that Herzog does not simply photograph people and events. Like the artists of the cave, he conveys what he sees as the truth of a phenomenon. It is about his perspective as well as his subject. In Cave of Forgotten Dreams he does not simply tell us of a remarkable discovery, he explores the origin of our desire to express our inner lives. One could almost say that as a filmmaker he has stumbled upon his roots, and in typical Herzog fashion he finds them not in something as obvious as the birth of the cinema, but the dawn of human art.
Written by Mr Phil