Chauvet Cave in southern France is a highly restricted yet incredibly well preserved artifact of ancient human culture, and it features some of the oldest cave paintings ever discovered. Unlike Lascaux Cave, which allowed public viewing of the Paleolithic art inside until recent mold outbreaks, Chauvet is closed to the public and sealed from the outside. While this preserves the art, it also prevents anyone from seeing it. That is, of course, until now — with Warner Herzog’s new film “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” providing a 3-D glimpse into the inconceivable past.
The prolific Werner Herzog is the perfect director to present a lasting image of the caves to the world. He is a compelling and inventive filmmaker who tackles narrative and documentary projects with gusto, whose recent notable projects include 2005’s Grizzly Man and 2007’s Encounters at the End of the World. Always relentlessly intent on finding the most interesting part of a subject, Herzog interviews scientists using varying degrees of personal interest and humor, but finds the greatest success in depictions of paintings within the space of the cave accompanied by his own endlessly curious narration. It’s clear that he finds the cave fascinating, and his zeal to share the cave with others lifts what could have been a drab affair into a more palatable film.
The artifacts in the cave are nothing short of extraordinary. The paintings themselves depict many different animal species, and use the contour of the walls to connote movement, while the bone samples obtained from the cave floor have yielded even more potentially useful scientific information. Having said that, there are long stretches where the paintings themselves aren’t shown and the director gets off track. Unless you’re massively interested in Herzog’s topic, there’s just no way the film will be enthralling from start to finish.
Like many nature films in IMAX theatres playing in museums across the country, the movie plays out with striking visuals enhanced by 3-D technology, but the result is something perhaps better suited for an exhibit or The History Channel (one of the production companies behind the film), not the local multiplex. The amount of time the cave paintings have survived defies our comprehension, but there is only so much to learn from what we can find. There is a lot of guesswork involved in paleontology, and the scenes that involve scientists supposing what the people who painted here were like are tepid in comparison to the actual caves themselves. Herzog’s childlike curiosity helps a great deal, but Cave of Forgotten Dreams ultimately falls into a category with other important images detailing and preserving cultural artifacts, instead of an entertaining, must-see experience.
Final Grade: B