When Art And Spirit Were One.

We just went to see the new Werner Herzog documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams. It was truly a moving experience and probably the best use of 3-D I've seen. Herzog and his crew were given a few hours access to Chauvet Cave in France to film the oldest and best-preserved examples of cave art ever discovered.

The cave was discovered just a few years ago after having been sealed by a rockslide over 20,000 years ago. The cave has been under tight control by the French government ever since in order to protect the artwork from the kind of degradation seen at Lascaux where the breath of thousands of tourists has caused mold to grow over parts of the drawings. The drawings at Chauvet were done over the course of thousands of years, beginning about 32,000 years ago. That makes them twice as old as the similar artwork at Lascaux and other sites.

 The artwork is stylized, but remarkably accurate, indicating a sophisticated artistic style 

already in place. This is not the beginning of art, but the product of a culture 

with a tradition of drawing that whose first stumbling efforts we have yet to discover.

The use of 3-D is excellent, giving the viewer not only a good sense of space inside the cave, but also a greater appreciation of the way the artists used the contours of the rock to enhance the impact of their drawings.

Of course, this being Werner Herzog, you have to sit through a fair amount of guttural Teutonic maundering about the nature of man and art. Some of it is wonderfully apt, like the anecdote about the anthropologist who asks an Australian aborigine why he is painting. "It is not me painting," the man replies. "It is Spirit."

But then there's the sequence at the end with the albino crocodiles. Yep, you heard me. Nothing to do with the artwork in the cave, apparently Werner just likes albino crocodiles. "Perhaps we are like these albino crocodiles," he speculates in that patented basso profundo rumble. "But are we seeing our future selves or just our own reflection?" (Quotation guaranteed inaccurate, but not by much.)

Still I really recommend seeing this, especially in 3-D. It is genuinely awe-inspiring.

Check out the trailer.


















And my favorite Herzog parody.

P.