Review of Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) by Stephen M — 03 Apr 2011

I'm ashamed to say that my innate scepticism, coupled with the fact that it is a two-hour round trip to the nearest cinema with a 3D projector, has prevented me from jumping on the bandwagon until now. However, I was particularly keen to see Werner Herzog's film about the Palaeolithic cave paintings in the Ardèche region of southern France for a couple of reasons: a) this being a documentary rather than a narrative film, I wouldn't have to worry about the third dimension merely being used as a gimmicky substitute for a decent script, etc; and b) as a callow geology undergraduate, I once spent six weeks of a sweltering summer mapping a portion of the Ardèche, so here was an irresistible opportunity for a wistful wallow.

I have to say, before The Cave of Forgotten Dreams came along I'd never even considered the potential of 3D for anything other than narrative filmmaking, but having seen Herzog's remarkable film, I'm absolutely convinced the documentary is the format's natural home, perhaps even its saving grace if the novelty wears off again. With something like the Chauvet Cave - a fragile microclimate, hermetically sealed for its own protection and totally off limits to the general public - a documentary recorded by the privileged few on the inside is as close as you and I can reasonably expect to get, and traditionally this lack of access automatically restricts us to two dimensional media: photographs and film. But what Herzog demonstrates so brilliantly here is that the extra dimension is vital to our appreciation of this type of artwork. We can see, perhaps for the first time, how the contours of the cave walls are an absolutely integral part of the art itself; how, far from being a random process, the artists selected their 'canvasses' only after careful deliberation; and how they utilised the uneven surfaces for lighting effects, their flickering torches perhaps creating the illusion that the animals they had painted were moving over the walls.

Although he appears in the film, conducts interviews and narrates, it is to Herzog's great credit that he never gets in he way of his subject and generally leaves the paintings to speak for themselves. His 3D setups are typically simple but frequently powerful. As I often find with Herzog, though, I couldn't always make the imaginative leaps he seemed to be expecting of me, but I was swept along by his childlike sense of wonder just the same. The Experimental Archaeologist (I think that was how he was billed), dressed in deerskins and playing The Star-Spangled Banner on a reconstructed vulture-bone flute, didn't make me feel any closer to my Stone Age ancestors; watching the Master Perfumer sniff his way around the cave was about as satisfying as listening to Miss World on the radio; and I'm still scratching my head over the epilogue, which compares modern man to an albino alligator! All in all, though, magical stuff - see it while you can!