The older I get and the more movies I’ve seen, the more I equate movie view­ing expe­ri­ences with the same feel­ing I have while watch­ing fire­works. Wow Boom Bang Gone. Obscene spe­cial effects, poor writ­ing, end­less rehashes of a great idea some­one had 20 or more years ago; it seems these mod­ern movie qual­i­ties are all part of some intel­lec­tual fil­ter Hol­ly­wood pushes it’s cre­ativ­ity through these days. Then won­der­fully and inex­plic­a­bly some­times you have moments when you’ve felt like you’ve just seen a work on film that allows you to trust your eyes again. Some­times, your brain notices some­thing behind the bright and shiny things up there on the big screen. Some­thing between the frames. The syn­tax. Every once in a while, some­thing beau­ti­ful hap­pens to film — Werner Herzog.

Amy and I had the plea­sure of see­ing Herzog’s lat­est mas­ter­piece last fri­day on it’s open­ing night here in Portsmouth. In Cave of For­got­ten Dreams, Her­zog does human­ity and the arts a favor by going to South­ern France and doc­u­ment­ing the old­est known cave paint­ings in the world on film for every­one to see and enjoy for ages to come. It’s an excel­lent work that not only doc­u­ments this pre­his­toric achieve­ment of mankind, but also does so in painstak­ing detail. As most of Herzog’s docu-style work, he mixes unmea­sur­ble amounts of sub­jec­tiv­ity and objec­tiv­ity to cre­ate some­thing unique and time­less that will leave you pon­der­ing what you’ve seen for hours or even days.

Hats off to the French author­i­ties which, upon imme­di­ately real­iz­ing the value of such a national and worldly trea­sure, put the cave behind a locked steel door, but still some­how chose Her­zog and his team as the pro­fes­sion­als they would allow in to doc­u­ment these trea­sures on film. To me this shows that the French min­is­ter of cul­ture has remark­able insight on the value of art and dis­sem­i­na­tion of it’s mean­ings for the greater pub­lic. At one point a arche­ol­o­gist is inter­viewed and tells a story about a jour­nal­ist who while trav­el­ing with an Abo­rig­ine guide in Aus­tralia came upon some ancient cave paint­ings. Inex­plic­a­bly the Abo­rig­ine began to touch up the paint­ings him­self. Know­ing that his guide was no artist, the jour­nal­ist asked why he had the need to add to these ancient works of art. The guide’s response was that he wasn’t, but that the great spirit of the paint­ings was touch­ing them up through his hand. I could not help but think of this story after the movie and how in a way this is what Her­zog and his team was doing in the cave in France. By film­ing the cave paint­ings he was in essence “touch­ing up” the works, giv­ing them a new light and allow­ing them and all their mythol­ogy to be enjoyed by mod­ern humans. This theme occurs again in the movie when they point out a beau­ti­ful ani­mal in the cave that had yet another ani­mal over-layed on top. The crea­ture in front was painted over 2000 years after the original.

The film runs for about an hour and half and while I sat there and mar­veled the artis­tic achieve­ments of our ances­tors, I couldn’t help but ques­tion my own imag­i­na­tion and the last­ing power it might have. I mean, I con­sider myself a pretty cre­ative per­son, but will any­thing I cre­ate stand the test of time and com­pare with these paint­ings? Will any­one be around to “touch up” my works? The major­ity of things I cre­ate through code or audio record­ings reside in the mem­ory of a com­puter. Will com­put­ers even be rel­e­vant 30,000 years from now? My guess is prob­a­bly not. Although I do find com­fort in the fact that there’s a good chance the cre­ativ­ity and imag­i­na­tions of humans in gen­eral will sur­vive. These caves and this film shows proof of that.

Addi­tional Info:
Chau­vet Cave — Offi­cial web site from French Min­istry of cul­ture in French/English/Spanish.
Werner Her­zog offi­cial site — Cave of For­got­ten Dreams on Herzog’s offi­cial site. Don’t miss the excel­lent inter­view with Stephen Col­bert here.
Cave of For­got­ten Dreams - IFC films

Post Script

I would like to share an amaz­ing piece of audio that Minneapolis’s own Paul Fos­ter (fel­low Her­zog fan, writer, and film pro­fes­sional) made after being inspired by Herzog’s work.

I asked Paul if he could write us some­thing about what inspired him to make this track:

“I wish Werner Her­zog would record a com­plete read­ing of the King James Bible. I think that might just turn me back to God. The tone of Herzog’s voice, and the way he enun­ci­ates each word, is intox­i­cat­ing.  There’s an unde­ni­able strength in the voice. A power to per­suade. Like his films, Herzog’s inter­views are infused with a vital­ity and the sto­ries he tells about his life are related from a per­spec­tive that would seem unnat­ural if his voice weren’t simul­ta­ne­ously con­vinc­ing you that it couldn’t be any other way.

It was on a 16-hour road trip from New Hamp­shire to North Car­olina that I heard him being inter­viewed by Terry Gross on NPR. With a cer­tain amount of amaze­ment, he spoke of work­ing with the often-deranged Klaus Kin­ski and it occurred to me that the tales from his own life were no less aston­ish­ing. This is, after all, the man who once told Henry Rollins that he had no inter­est in find­ing or pros­e­cut­ing the man who shot him dur­ing a BBC inter­view because “this is not a seri­ous bul­let. It’s some­thing very exhil­a­rat­ing for a man to be shot at with lit­tle success.”

I wanted a way to lis­ten to parts of the NPR inter­view in another con­text and, in the spirit of what Her­zog calls ‘ecsta­tic truth,’ I folded bits and pieces of Kinski’s life into Herzog’s to cre­ate a biog­ra­phy of the direc­tor that was, some­how, more true. Lay­ing these clips onto a track from The Last Temp­ta­tion of Christ seemed a log­i­cal choice.”

–Paul Fos­ter