Cave Of Forgotten Dreams

Synopsis: A documentary detailing France’s Chauvet cave, named after Jean-Marie Chauvet, who in 1994 discovered hundreds of images of animals drawn on its walls around 32,000 years ago when lions and woolly mammoths roamed Europe.

The inaccessible and the mysterious have been recurring themes throughout the work of Werner Herzog. Cave of Forgotten Dreams is literally a double whammy in this respect - one which brings both qualities together in a truly remarkable event as the director takes us on a guided tour of  the earliest known example of man’s representational art.

The use of the term “art” is, of course a loaded one as we have no real idea what these images were used for. Herzog, very typically, refers to them in his narration as "the beginnings of the modern human soul". Be that as it may, what is unquestionable is their technical sophistication. At one point Picasso is mentioned and certainly the fluidity and grace of line and deftness of shading matches anything that the most highly regarded artist of the 20th century ever did. Herzog’s description of them as "proto-cinema" is also justified, certainly more so than his film’s poetically allusive title.

Exactly what dreams were forgotten is never explained but small matter. One of the charms of Herzog’s ruminative approach is the way he loves to speculate, to run with the accidental and the incidental where other documentarians might focus more closely on the didactic or the dramatic. This gives us, the audience, much more a sense of also being actual visitors to the site, asking our own subjectively-determined questions. making our own inferences and drawing our own conclusions.

Technically, Cave of Forgotten Dreams is unembellished. There are a couple of  extraneous Errol Morris-like moments of people silently staring at the camera that feel like false notes but there are more quietly delightful moments such as when Herzog gets distracted by one archeologist’s former career as a circus performer. For anyone interested in where we have come from and where we are going, his latest film is one not to be missed.

 

 

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