This post may be a rather strange one…in that it is essentially a movie review for a movie which I haven’t seen (OK, I’ve seen the trailer, but that doesn’t count for much does it?).

Werner Herzog has a movie which is currently in limited release called “The Cave of Forgotten Dreams.” The reason I feel interested enough to write a piece about this ‘unseen’ movie is because of the movies’ subject…not the direction, acting, or cinematography (all of which may very well be fantastic…).

The subject is cave paintings, in a recently found cave in France, which may be over 30,000 years old. This makes these drawings, scratchings, and painting twice as old as the fames Lascaux paintings (about 17,000 years ago).

As a topic, this is a great place to consider the idea of ‘wonder’. When we were very young this was our stock in trade… to be three years old and filled with wonder and defiance is almost the definitive human stance.

I know from most of my experiences as a teacher, that somehow we lose this sense, we have it taken from us, or have it crushed…regardless, it seems to disappear from so many of us…if only because of lack of maintenance.

So the notion that there may be an intrinsic sense of wonder when contemplating something created by human ancestors (likely well over 1,000 generations ago!) is an easy place to start to recapture wonder…

The Cabinet of Werner Herzog: Thoughts on "The Cave of Forgotten Dreams"
http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/37599/the-cabinet-of-werner-herzog-thoughts-on-the-cave-of-forgotten-dreams

If you’re tired of the art world’s race toward novelty, the latest documentary from Werner Herzog is for you.

The man who took on the Amazon in "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" has now taken on pre-history. In "Cave of Forgotten Dreams," the mostly-charcoal cave pictures of animals that Herzog films near Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc in the Ardeche region of southern France are more than 30,000 years old. Herzog’s film would be a wild novelty if brazen, weird expeditions weren’t already his trademark.

The film is hypnotic, and I’m saying this about the work of a man who claims to have hypnotized his entire cast in "Heart of Glass" (1976).

Bear in mind that "pre-history" is a convenient term for a time that we don’t know much about. But these pictures are old. For a sense of perspective, the cave artists of Lascaux (17,300 years ago) are about midway between us and the Chauvet artists.

A rock face fell some 8,000 years ago to cover what had been the entrance to the caves. That miracle preserved the pictures. A near-total prohibition by the French government on entering the caves is a step toward continuing to preserve them.

Archaeologists found them in 1994. Access is extremely restricted. Until now, all we had were official still photographs. Now "Cave of Forgotten Dreams," thanks to 3-D, gives you an intimate (or claustrophobic) sense of the space in which the "artists" worked.

The Spring Issue: Werner Herzog and Jan Simek on Caves
http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/05/02/the-spring-issue-werner-herzog-and-jan-simek-on-caves

JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN

Mr. Herzog, you mention in the new film that you were limited to very few days and hours of shooting in the Chauvet cave, because of the possible ill effects (mold and so forth) that too much human traffic could have on the fragile environment. Also you had very little crew, and were forced to keep the equipment light. How might the movie have been different, if you’d been given unlimited access?

WERNER HERZOG

Constraints—which in this case were massive—are never really completely productive. However, I had to focus to the very essentials, and probably, with two or three times as much schedule available for me, the film wouldn’t have been much different. It has never, in my life as a filmmaker, made much difference how the constraints were. Technical constraints, schedules, you name it—they always have forced me to be quick and intelligent.

One small thing, maybe, which keeps nagging me, is a sort of a scratched painting, the outlines of an owl. It’s very strange and mysterious, and unique, because you do not have depictions of birds in the Paleolithic caves—with one exception that comes to mind: Lascaux, where there is a bison apparently hit by spears. His entrails are coming out of his belly, and there’s a dead man on the ground, face up, and there’s a stick, and a bird on it, as if the soul of the man were departing him. A beautiful and touching image, but of course, a different cave, and something like 18,000 years later.

The problem with the owl in Chauvet is that you can only film it properly with light coming from profile. And as we could not step beyond the confinements of a metal walkway that runs through the cave, protecting the floor, it would have been very difficult to move a light. Perhaps on some sticks we could have held something, and with quite some time and tricky arrangements, I could have made it visible. But I take it as it is.

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