La cueva de los sueños olvidados

This is a truly awful mess. Harzog's reputation must have swayed many critics, preventing them, perhaps out of overawed politeness, from admitting that this is too long and too empty, and not at all helped by the director's vaporings. He wonders rhetorically, at one point, whether 'We are the crocodiles of the future gazing into the distant past' or some such nonsense. (I liked him better when he was shoving boats over mountains.) This business comes at the end, when we (for what reason?) visit a nuclear power station whose waste heat is being used (again, for what reason?) in a kind of hot house to raise crocodiles. Another more important irrelevancy is a prolonged visit with museums elsewhere in Europe; there we hear about the sort of humans who never entered our cave. There are numerous interviews with experts; they convey little except that they are quite impressed with themselves. One of them proposes that the ancient cave artists used spears made of wood with a sharp piece of bone for a point, and insist on demonstrating his ineptitude in throwing it (at nothing). Another plays 'The Star-Spangled Banner' on a bone flute. Another talks about what we can see in a specific painting--but we can't, as the camera doesn't pause for a look.

The art? It's fantastic stuff, thrillingly beautiful--and my experience of it was damaged by Herzog's refusal to recognize the fact: there isn't very much of it, and showing the same images over and over and over again seriously dilutes their impact, especially when accompanied by varying (often awful) lighting; gassy, fake-cosmic narration (what WAS Herzog smoking??); and a score that could be used as a substitute for water-boarding. All this babble and repetition is necessary because Herzog never had enough material to make into a movie. National Geographic would have done this in an hour, not 90 minutes, done it better, and not wasted any resources on 3D.

Unprecedented access? Yes! 32,000 years old? Probably! Moving and beautiful art? Yes, but so little that my wife's comment sums it up well: 'This isn't a movie. It's ten great postcards.'

The paintings on the walls of the Chauvet Cave in southern France are what makes this film interesting. This cave was discovered only in 1994 and the paintings are dated to about 30,000 years ago. Not shown are the early paintings in the Lascaux Cave (also in southern France) discovered in 1940. The paintings in the Chauvet Cave predate those in the Lascaux by about 10,000 years. Lessons were learned from the Lascaux cave about how allowing lighting and large numbers of human visitors changed the cave climate, causing significant problems like lichens, mold, and fungus blemishes on the walls. Lessons learned from the Lascaux cave have been applied to the Chauvet Cave resulting in severely limited access and the use of special portable battery-powered lighting. Human traffic in Chauvet is restricted to a series of metal walkways.

While it is admirable that a high level of care is being taken to preserve the Chauvet Cave, it is unfortunate that so few people can have the privilege of seeing the original artwork. So, we can be thankful that this film offers a wide audience the opportunity to see the treasures of the cave. Given all the restrictions Herzog must have been persistent in his being allowed into the cave with a small crew in order to film the paintings and other items of interest.

In general I have little use for 3D, but it is of value in viewing the paintings, since the contours of the walls play a role in the effect the paintings create. However, I am not sure that viewing in 2D would not be almost as impressive. One can only stand in awe of the beauty of the artwork. I am sure that one thing that fascinated Herzog was evidence of great artistry dating back to such an early time, indicating that such an impulse has been in the history of man for a long time. It's in our DNA.

Outside of the filming of the interior of the cave, I found the 3D effects to be quite distracting. Camera movement often resulted in visual artifacts. I can understand that the lighting could be a bit dark in the interior of the cave, but even the scenes filmed outside the cave seemed dark. This may have been a projection problem in the theater I went to, but I came away with eyestrain and the conviction that 3D is more of a gimmick than an innovation.

I wish there had been some discussion of how the paintings might have been done, no matter how speculative. There was not much pigmentation in the painting, but there was some. What was used for the paint? It looked like mostly charcoal, but there was no evidence of fires having existed in the cave. Was the charcoal brought in from exterior fires? What was the means of application? Interesting that there were no human remains in the cave; wonder why that was? Herzog seems happy to simply dwell on the mystery, but I think it would have been fun to hear speculations from experts on details.

The elements of the movie outside the filming of the paintings I did not find added much. A lot of it struck me as filler so that this could be made into a feature length film. In particular the "postscript" filmed in an interior biosphere that attached some meaning to albino alligators left me totally perplexed and wondering if a segment from some other movie had been spliced in.

I found the musical accompaniment added to the appreciation of the mystery of the paintings.

An introduction followed by a tour of the paintings would have had more of an impact on me.

Werner Herzog can do no wrong at the moment in my eyes and with this documentary about the Chauvet caves of Southern France, the oldest known artwork on the earth, he is continuing this trend. Filmed mostly on non-professional cameras due to the lack of moving room in the caves, it charts Herzog's limited access to the heavily restricted cave system that was discovered by mountaineers in 1994 and is a fascinating look at the cave drawings that are 30,000 years old. They are a amazing insight into what life was like then for humans as they are quite detailed in the types of animals roaming (lions, woolly rhinos, mammoth and buffalo, remember that this is France!) and the drawings themselves are of amazing quality and have a strange animated feel to them in the way they are drawn. With the restrictions put in place he is quite limited in where he can go and how much time he has but he has managed to capture the feel of the cave well with only torches and fairly basic cameras and i'm sure if saw in 3d as intended (damn my local cinema!), it would make it a even better experience. What the rest of the film entails is Herzog interviewing the many (sometimes unintentionally hilarious) people involved from historians, artists, perfume smeller's and archaeologists and him doing his unique and often brilliantly blunt narrating over all of this. Then comes the albino crocodiles in a artificial tropical enclosure at the end that have some sort of radiation mutation from a close by nuclear generator and you have another amazing film from the main man, Werner Herzog.

Don't miss auteur Werner Herzog's memorable documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, about the French Chauvet Cave. It contains the earliest extant art work of humanity from over 30,000 years ago. Paleolithic renderings of animals such as horses, lions, and cave bears, some in motion as if early filmmaking ("a form of proto-cinema," Herzog says) are rendered so lifelike by the film that I'm satisfied to have gotten as close as is possible without damaging the environment.

With special permission from the culture ministry and only a few hours per day, Herzog takes a non-professional 3-D camera and a few scientists and crew into the cave, which was sealed by a landslide some 20, 000 years ago and therefore in pristine shape. So careful are the French that they plan to construct a theme park with exact reproduction of the Cave in order to satisfy the public's natural interest in seeing the drawings but yet keep them from spoiling the treasures with their breaths.

3-D aids appreciation of the curvatures of the caves and the rich dimensions of the drawings, about 400 of them, and the cave-bear fossils and scratches. Ernst Reijseger's understated orchestration complements the lyrical and mysterious world that Herzog's voice cradles.

Because no one is allowed to walk outside the small walkway and few humans will ever enter, an eerie Egyptian tomb-like atmosphere pervades, captured by Herzog's pensive, wistful ruminations about mankind. For the director of such eccentric films as Aguirre: The Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, both about mysteriously powerful humans, and similarly the documentary Grizzly, about an odd bear lover, this film is evidence of the filmmaker's wide-ranging zest for the inscrutable spiritual roots of secular achievement and madness.

Of course, there's the romantic take by the French scientists and narrator Herzog, who all describe hearing the voices of these ancient homo-sapien artists echo in the chambers. Herzog's inscrutable post script, perfectly in character with this out-there director involves nuclear reactors, warm water, and thriving alligators. When you figure out his meaning of the doppelganging albino alligators, write me with your answer, for I'm still trying to figure it out.

Meanwhile, Cave of Forgotten Dreams is a superior documentary with the right combination of visual clarity and authorial insight to make everlastingly memorable the forgotten dreams of our ancestors and ourselves.

This is the first Herzog feature I've seen on the big screen and I had read a few reviews on here before going. It's worth noting that I went to the Greenwich Picturehouse cinema in London. The screen, seating, sound and facilities were first class. I'd urge you to see this somewhere with top quality projection and sound.

This is a film about some French caves that contain paintings and markings made up to 32,000 years ago. Herzog documents the difficulties in viewing these astonishing sights and the further problems in filming them. As he seems to be able to do in any situation, Werner finds the most interesting, possibly obsessed and eccentric people to help illustrate the remarkable nature of this cave network.

The film is in 3D. A special 3D camera was made due to the constricted nature of the caves and the early part of the film was shot on a non-professional camera. A few reviews have complained of noise from low light dancing in 3D before their eyes. I saw none of this at all - in fact the 3D was really well handled and didn't detract from the subject matter at all. The undulation in the rocks are part of the paintings - the people that painted them used the contours as the shape of the things they drew. All that said, I don't know how well the 3D will translate to the small screen.

The sound is entrancing. The score is haunting and majestic, much like the French scenery we see and swoop over. A few people have complained of the heartbeat noise that is heard over the "silence" that we're told to experience but I felt it worked well, even on the second occurrence.

There are some odd moments, keeping to Herzog's style, including a crocodile-infested biosphere on the Rhone which Herzog uses to describe the human impact on the environment in the area around the caves. A few of the cave-investigating scientists are odd too, but I imagine the Bavarian director's questions often create an impression of abnormality in the sanest of subjects. Some of the interviews reminded me of The White Diamond or the friends of Tim Treadwell in Grizzly Man.

I'm delighted to have seen a Herzog film on the big screen and felt that this was the equal of "Encounters" or "Grizzly Man". It doesn't have the edgy feel of La Soufriere but that's to its credit. Go see it if you can but make sure it's at the best screen you can.