Cave of Forgotten Dreams 3D
IFC Centre, August 3, 2011
Movie #52 for 2011
I hate 3D. I haven’t seen a 3D film since they started simultaneously releasing 2D and 3D versions. Cave of Forgotten Dreams is only screening in 3D, and I think that’s why it took me so long to get to it. I really freaking hate 3D.
But I got there in the end and here’s what I think in a nutshell: Werner Herzog would make a terrible archaeologist.
In Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Herzog (the world’s most idiosyncratic documentary film maker) takes a camera crew along to the Chauvet caves in the south of France to shoot some seriously old and beautiful cave paintings (part of which is pictured). The paintings were discovered in 1994 and have never been open to the public. The site itself is extraordinary both in terms of archaeological significance and artistic merit - the cave drawings are magnificent and, despite some serious restrictions from the Ministry of Culture, Herzog manages to get some amazing footage. He also interviews the numerous archaeologists, artists and other, more vaguely occupied people about the cave and the work they do in it.
As an archaeologist, I found the cave paintings to be extraordinary. As an archaeologist, I found the documentary to be maddening. Here’s the difficulty with art as archaeology: art is open to interpretation, material culture is not. We are expected to engage with the story of an artwork through projection and interpretation, particularly to try and understand the artist’s intentions. We can’t do this with archaeology. To project or interpret the material culture - a vase say, or a cave painting of a pair of fighting woolly rhinos - and try to understand not just the artist’s intentions, but their culture is dangerous, presumptuous and disrespectful. But that’s exactly what Herzog does. He - laughably - calls it a search for the beginnings of a human soul. A lot of his voice over is this variety of florid, pretentious and offensively ignorant.
The other thing I hate about Herzog’s insistence that the Chauvet cave paintings signify the burgeoning of a human soul, is that the cave artists are seriously accomplished. You can’t just draw incredibly well on a whim, when you one day discover that you’ve got a soul and want to use it. The artists had been drawing for a long time elsewhere - either in other, as yet undiscovered caves, but more likely on and with materials that didn’t survive in the cultural record. This is what I mean by projection and interpretation - Herzog is so determined that his version is correct and meaningful, he vigorously stretches logic and ignores it when it breaks.
What I did like about the film is the footage of the drawings themselves and the archaeological context for the works (both in terms of environment and other artworks). I also enjoyed Herzog’s commentary about filming inside the cave under the ministry’s strict condiotions. He’s a good film-maker, just not a very good archaeologist.
