MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL: Any documentary by Werner Herzog has a certain hard-to-pin-down weirdness. His gift seems to be that he can take just about any real world subject and make it strange; not so it becomes alien, but in some hard-to-articulate way, very human.
A highlight of any Herzog documentary is Herzog himself (at least for this writer). He often narrates his films. His delivery is often clumsy, his still-very thick Teutonic accent a long way from soothing. His writing is wordy and his musings, given over to metaphysical contemplations, downright outrageous at times, skirting just this side of pretension and often tripping over into complete and utter nuttiness. And yet, the overall effect is hypnotic and charming.
Herzog at his best, in films like Grizzly Man (2005) and Encounters at the End of the World (2007), pulls off an astounding trick; you feel alone with him and his film. Its like he’s talking directly to you. And so it is with Cave of Forgotten Dreams, which is both an astonishing sensory experience and a heady essay about the way science can be like a mystical time machine.
Shot in 3D practically, Herzog’s film is a high-tech art history excursion that takes the viewer into the Chauvet Cave on France’s Ardeche River, the site where in 1994, archaeologists discovered the world’s oldest paintings.
The spine of the film is a trip into the cave, which in the interests of preserving its precious and delicate discoveries, is off-limits to all but those specialists whose task it is to investigate its treasures. Herzog and a crew of three were given special permission by the French to shoot inside the cave in the northern spring of 2010 for a limited time (the film is edited from a half-dozen of four-hour trips to the site). What Herzog came back with is breathtaking at times; the paintings of bears, wolves and other animals are beautiful, provocative and very moving.
For the experts interviewed here, the paintings inspire awe for their sophistication and artistry (as well as telling us a great deal about ancient lifestyles, customs and mores). For the uninitiated (like this writer) they seem proof that our ancient ancestors seemed compelled by a deep impulse to capture a moment in time and in doing so, in a way tell their own story through the agency of painting. Still, there seems an interest in form itself; in one astonishing painting the artist has attempted to illustrate movement by painting a herd of bison!
For Herzog the cave is an occasion to muse on the idea of art itself (as well as the nature of man). 'It’s quite evident that it is Us," Herzog says here. 'It is Us 32,000 to 35,000 years ago." His point being that the paintings were created by Paleolithic man (the Neanderthals were already on the way out, we’re told) and that the cave, which was not used for anything other than painting and ceremonies, was a kind of art gallery. Or to put it another way, art is not learned or manufactured; it is innate – but is that really possible to accept? Were these paintings conscious art or the offspring of an undefined impulse? Of course Herzog accepts the impossibility of arriving at a definitive answer to this brain twister but he does not equivocate or waffle about his own feelings. He erupts into overdrive at times as his camera beholds the majesty of the work on view here: "It never got better [Picasso was a primitive by comparison Herzog implies!].
'It is as if the modern human soul erupted here."
The cave and the art there move Herzog into a series of tangents that include albino alligators, and pondering whether ancient man dreamed and cried the way we dream and cry"¦
Actually too much discussion about Herzog and his musings can sadly distract from the fact that the director is often a truly splendid filmmaker, a brilliant manipulator of sound and image with an eye for beauty and mystery (and anyway, his mystique has long been suspected by fans as a delicious form of satire at the expense of, well, overly cerebral documentary filmmakers).
A key to the film’s success is the use of 3D; and the technique here is the best I’ve seen; and that includes the big blockbusters. It achieves what few films have been able to do; you really feel like the movie is happening around you. Here the camera is used as a tool to offer up a celebration of natural wonder. Rock formations, rivers and the cave itself are shot in way that inspires grandeur; the camera (mounted on a specialist rig) floats and dives across the landscape. Herzog is clearly enraptured by what he has found here. He wants to fill your eyes and your psyche with its splendors"¦and dreams.
