“Cave of Forgotten Dreams” couldn’t have a more accurate title. The new documentary by Werner Herzog takes viewers on a rare tour deep inside a cave in France that, hidden until the mid 1990s, is filled with hundreds of cave paintings dating back 35,000 years.
The paintings include images of wild animals -- many now extinct -- in battle, hunting, fleeing a predator or even sharing an affectionate moment with a mate.
Believed to be the oldest cave paintings in existence, they have an exquisite artistic quality that makes them jump off the cave walls, a canvas that was used to create the impression of depth, shadow and movement by the artists.
Who painted the hundreds of images, why, and what were they trying to express? The film asks all these questions and provides some answers while acknowledging that a full understanding of the ‘why’ will never be achieved.
Herzog seems OK with that, content to accept that the images represent the dreams of a long-gone people. And perhaps only through our own dreams can we glimpse what life may have been like for the artists., he suggests.
The Chauvet cave in France’s Ardeche region was discovered almost by accident by three hikers in 1993. Its entrance had been closed off by a landslide or rockfall millennia earlier, effectively sealing and preserving the artistry within.
Almost immediately the importance of the discovery was realized and the French government quickly restricted access and installed a steel door on the cave.
Other than a handful of scientists and researchers, few people have been allowed access in the 18 years since, which is one of the reasons Herzog’s film is so exciting.
Shooting in 3D (though I watched it on DVD) Herzog and a crew of two others, permitted only to take three cold-frame, battery powered lights and minimal camera gear with them, were allowed four hours of shooting per day for a number of weeks.
There were strict limitations. They were forbidden from stepping off of the aluminum walkway that runs through the cave, meaning the crew was often caught in the shot due to the tight spaces they work working within. Nor could they leave the cave during their four-hour window, or the day’s visit would immediately end because the caretakers wanted to minimize the amount of airflow into the cave.
But those restrictions don’t seem to have had a negative affect on the film. The flashlight beams illuminating the images, the unsteady hand-held lighting and camera work, make the paintings appear as they must have 30,000 years ago, illuminated by torch or firelight, with shadows sharply contrasting against highlights.
The images are powerful and even somewhat disturbing in their realism. Due to their perfect preservation, they appear as though they could have been drawn yesterday. In one instance, black marks show where a torch was scratched against the ceiling. And on the floor below are the fragments of charcoal. Incredible.
One of the anthropologists studying the cave explains that when he was first allowed access, he found himself almost haunted by the experience. He was obsessed with the riveting images while in the cave, then relieved to once again emerge above ground, and would later dream about the drawings at night.
Herzog described a similar experience.
“Dwarfed by these large chambers illuminated by our wandering lights, sometimes we were overwhelmed by a strange irrational sensation as if we were disturbing the Paleolithic people in their work, it felt like eyes upon us. This sensation occurred to some of the scientists and also the discoverers of the cave, it was a relief to resurface again above ground,” he explained in the film’s narration.
The paintings mostly depict animals that were indigenous to the area at the time they were created. Horses, rhinoceroses, wooly mammoths, tigers and leopards all make an appearance.
In one case, the beautiful single-line style illustration of a now extinct species of a female and male lion answered a long-held question about whether the male of that species had a mane. It did not, the painting revealed.
Many of the paintings show animals in action with, with extra legs painted in to show movement, or multiple horns on a rhinoceros, giving the clear impression that the creature is rearing his head in fury.
Another image shows four horses, their heads almost superimposed over each other. They are drawn with such sophistication that they would not be out of place in any gallery today. And fascinatingly, each horse has a slightly different expression and they seem to cover a variety of moods and attitudes.
The narrator points out that one of the horses’ mouth is open, as though he is whinnying.
The artists clearly studied the animals in great depth. Did they do so as hunters, future domesticators, or simply out of an early human fascination? We don’t know and likely never will.
There is only one human image in the cave. In the deepest recesses, a woman’s form is drawn on a stalactite, with her sexual organs over-emphasized to symbolize fertility.
Near the entrance of the cave, an artist painted multiple positive impressions of his own hand – a hand with a slightly crooked little finger. Then, much deeper in the cave, that hand shows up again as a signature, or calling card of sorts, provoking fascination among the researchers desperate for any clues to the identity of the artists.
And deep in the cave there is the track of an 8 year-old boy, and alongside it, the track of a wolf.
“Did a hungry wolf stalk the boy or did they walk together as friends. Or were the tracks made thousands of years apart? We’ll never know,” Herzog says, his words serving as one more reminder that the mysteries of such a deep past will remain so, even amid the discovery of such a direct connection to those who walked on two legs thousands of years ago.
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