“CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS” My rating: A- (In theaters on April 15)
90 minutes | No MPAA rating
Werner Herzog’s great documentary, first released in 2011, has been digitally spiffed up and is now playing at theaters. Thought I’d share my original review:
The art on display in “Cave of ForgottenDreams” is so jaw-droppingly beautiful that it can move a viewer to tears.
These are the oldest known paintings on Earth, created in charcoal on the walls of France’s Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc cave more than 30,000 years ago.
Discovered in the early ’90s, the cavern’s natural entrance was long ago blocked by a landslide, leaving the treasures untouched and hermetically sealed for millennia. This Pleistocene art is so fragile and priceless that only scientists and scholars are allowed to view it.
Except, that is, for director Werner Herzog, who got permission to take small 3-D cameras into Chauvet, emerging with a documentary so ravishing and eerily evocative that it’s like discovering the magic of art all over again.
Our Ice Age ancestors decorated the walls with incredible renderings of the animals they depended on. There are lions, huge rhinos, woolly mammoths, stags with immense horns, massive bison, all rendered with an eye for each breed’s characteristics that reveals a lifetime of observation. Three racing horses are uncanny … they look as if they were painted by Matisse.
There are also the handprints in red stain. We know they were made by the same person because of his/her broken little finger.
Herzog interviews the scientists. One produces a reproduction of a prehistoric bone flute and notes that it works on the same pentatonic scale used today. He demonstrates by cheekily blowing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
But mostly Herzog lets his camera linger on the art, with the 3-D magically revealing how countless painters over several thousand years employed undulations in the cave walls to capture their subjects.
The camera floats across the cavern floor, littered with dozens of skulls of now-extinct cave bears who sometimes violated the manmade art by sharpening their claws on the limestone. A child’s footprint has been preserved. The remains of campfires have sat untouched since a time when glaciers sat a mile deep on the continent.
The experience is transcendent. Herzog may strike some as a pragmatic filmmaker, but “Cave of ForgottenDreams” is about nothing less than the birth of the human soul.
It will most assuredly do your soul good.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 