CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS
Written, Directed & Narrated by Werner Herzog
Produced by Erik Nelson & Adrienne Ciuffo
Released by Sundance Selects
Canada/USA/France/ Germany/UK. 90 min. Rated G
 

What’s being touted first and foremost about Werner Herzog’s new film is that a director with such a maverick career has suddenly jumped on the 3-D bandwagon, so let’s get it out of the way. With Cave of Forgotten Dreams, the 3-D is subtly effective. It’s not so in your face that you’re not able to get a good handle on the foreground or background with your eyes. Only a few times was I annoyed by a shot obfuscated by something like a hand coming towards the lens. The rest of the time the 3-D visuals make the surroundings more pronounced, including (my favorite) crystals on the walls of the titular cave.

The film’s a fascinating look into the artistic process, though this comes after the initial thrill of getting an exclusive look at the wall paintings of Chauvet-Pont d’Arc in France, the first found drawings by man made tens of thousands of years ago, older than those at the Lescaux Caves. It’s also how humans have (possibly) always had a need to tell stories. But it’s strange that at times the visual quality looks really spectacular and crisp and clear, but some low-grade shots look like what Herzog used to film the iguana close up in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.

Actually, what is more than fascinating is Herzog’s attempt to find the key to human expression, what makes us human and apart from the animals. At one point, one of the scientists has a computer demonstration of a time line for the paintings: first came the bear, who would just scratch at the wall; and then a human, who would use a stick and make a drawing up eight feet high. Then another human would come along and build upon it (or maybe it was the same one) and make more images, and suddenly there’s a story being told. I was completely absorbed seeing how the first moving images made (what Herzog calls “proto-cinema”).

There is only one human seen in the paintings: the below-the-waist section of a woman entwined with a… buffalo. This is another fascinating thing about the film, learning how humans saw animals and nature around them and how they were as much documentarians as artists. But for Herzog, this isn’t quite enough for a movie, and thankfully so. It’s not dry material, but it may vary for some audiences. I could see some viewers becoming bored by a few involving talking heads going on about this or that in the cave or outside of it. It’s more like you’d hear in a museum tour guide.

But if I am going to have someone take me by the hand in a museum and say “Here, look at this, I present it to you like so,” and it’s Werner Herzog, I’ll go along with it. And since it’s Herzog, he makes it unique. There’s a haunting moment, among the best of his work, where one of the scientists in the cave asks for a moment of silence so one can hear his/her own heartbeat. Everyone is quiet, the camera pans, and the eerie music that flows throughout Herzog’s film (nay, his oeuvre in general) comes through. And a heartbeat is also audible, too. In the packed pre-release screening where I saw the film, you could hear a pin drop.

The other interesting aspects about the film is what Herzog finds outside of the cave: a man who spends his life trying to find caves with his sense of smell and being able somehow to find them. (He also sells perfumes, so this is like a hobby we’re told.) And another scientist shows how people in the Paleolithic era would hunt. He demonstrates with some less-than-adequate (but admirable) skill how to throw a spear.

But most surreal, yet perfect, is how Herzog wraps up this film, which for the most part has consisted of wonderful talking heads matched up with wonderful, hypnotic footage of the caves (sometimes in still shots, other times with a camera moving and panning around, which makes for the effective 3-D footage where the pictures on the wall stand out). In the postscript, he ventures to a nuclear power plant some 20 miles away and, more specifically, to a greenhouse. Only this greenhouse is more of a place to house tropical plants and crocodiles. And not just any crocodiles, oh no, crocodiles mutated by radiation and having albino alligator babies. Just when Nicolas Cage’s Bad Lieutenant iguanas weren’t enough for you… and yet Herzog ties it into what we’ve just seen, of how humanity is so fragile and magical and art so recognizable.  It’s this kind of wonderment that makes Herzog a great filmmaker and storyteller. Few minds in cinema are so inquisitive, visually audacious, and just… odd. Jack Gattanella
April 29, 2011