Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010)

directed by Werner Herzog
Germany/France
90 minutes
5 stars out of 5
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Chauvet Cave is very beautiful even if you don't see what's on the walls- it's a space where time operates differently, and the unbelievably slow growth of calcite and other minerals making up the materials of the cave itself would seem to suggest that this is not the dominion of humanity; it belongs to the earth, who can reclaim it as she sees fit. But the cave isn't just a stunningly beautiful yet empty cave, it contains some of the most important and ancient works of art found thus far. 

Time is possibly the most important theme in Cave of Forgotten Dreams outside of its deep, intimate exploration of what it means to be a human. At one point it's mentioned that some drawings were found to have been separated by 5,000 years- as in, someone drew the first animal and then, five thousand years later, someone else came into the cave and drew right next to it. That's a scale of time more akin to what I said about the growth of rock formations. Wikipedia is 15 years old. Television is somewhere around 91 years old. The first McDonald's opened its doors 61 years ago. Time has, as of late, begun to move at such a breakneck speed that barely anything stays around for five thousand years, and certainly not anything that would carry on a continuous chain of human interaction.

I get the sense that Herzog wants to involve himself in his finished product as little as possible, as usually he stays behind the camera in films where he isn't crammed into a cave with no space to extract himself out of the shot. Occasionally he'll include his questions to his interviewees, possibly just for context, possibly for some artistic reason that I don't know. But the hand with which he creates his documentaries is one utterly sympathetic to humanity, and this style of filmmaking pays off particularly well in his exploration of what we may have been doing 35,000 years ago in a cave in France.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams is full of moments where the viewer is unable to do anything but become drawn into the human element of the cave. It's an incredibly emotional film, but the part that really got me the most was when they took a specific handprint from the wall of prints at the mouth of the cave and were able to track that individual further into the cave because he had a crooked pinky finger. That level of detail and intimacy struck me hard, because at that moment, the past wasn't dead.

I love this movie and its subject matter so much because cynicism can't touch it. You can study art in academia as much as you like, but this movie forces us to confront the fact that no matter what kind of tests we subject the paintings to and how much we trace their biological and scientific properties, art is an expression of individuality, and Chavet Cave is one of the best arguments for seeing our ancestors as individuals. Everybody should watch this who is in school, if you've been given some short explanation of the cave that only summed up the bare bones of it. Something like this being shown in a classroom could make a huge impact on a student's opinion of paleoanthropology and start them off on a journey to become more intimate with the distant past.