Cave Of Forgotten Dreams

I saw Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams the other night. I'm not a big fan of Herzog, and he does some of the same things in this film that made me dislike him (pseudo philosophizing, confusing tangents, etc.), but, when all is said and done, this is a film definitely worth seeing, if only for the opportunity to see the ancient cave drawings in 3D.

The first thing that strikes you is how well the drawings have been preserved. They don't look like they were made as much as 35,000 years ago. Some look as if they could have been drawn last week. Suddenly, 35,000 years ago doesn't seem that distant.

The next thing you notice is the quality of the drawings. They don't look like “primitive” drawings at all, not in the sense of being childish or simple, the way we too often stereotype anything primitive. One is drawn with eight legs, each set gradually fading, as if to suggest motion, creating a kind of proto-cinematic effect. Another, of a buffalo, depicts the head of the animal looking directly at the viewer, not to the side, demonstrating a knowledge of perspective tens of thousands of years before the Renaissance. The detail and firm elegant lines of a series of horses suggest a mastered and studied technique forged over several years in a rigorous art school. Two rhinos are clashing in combat, their bodies in full motion, perfectly proportioned in spite of the curved contours of the cave walls used as canvas. Even some of the less well drawn figures show evidence of sophistication and creativity. A series of lions are drawn in profile but with two Picassoesque eyes. A misshaped rhino propels its tongue out like a monster from a child's nightmare, creating an almost surreal effect.

The worst executed drawings are side by side with the best, the simplest with the most sophisticated. You feel, as a viewer, neither awed or repulsed, alienated neither by a specialized perfection or an amateur crudity. Instead, you feel a camaraderie with the artists, a sense of kinship for ancestors of a forgotten past. And once again 35,000 years doesn't seem that long ago.

But the sense of connection one feels doesn't come at the expense of wonder. To the contrary, the mystery only thickens as you ponder the drawings' purpose and meaning. The only human depictions are hands, mostly made by the same person, and, depending on your interpretation, a nude overweight female figure embraced by a buffalo. Everything else depicts a non-human animal, mostly horses, rhinos, lions, and buffalo. I saw one bear, but why only one? The cave floor is littered with bear skulls. One of them seems to be placed as if on a pedestal, ashes found below, suggesting a kind of worship. It's unlikely that humans ever lived in the cave (no human bones have been found). It was used only for art and maybe for worship. The cave was home only to other animals, primarily the bear, which, one would think, would weigh heavily on the artists' minds as they created. Yet only one bear is depicted. And if not bear, why not humans? Why only human hand prints? Why is there no history of a tribe drawn out such as you see in some of the ancient drawings from the Americas? Does the lack of the human form show a blissful lack of self-consciousness, an obedience to a lost tradition, symbols for a totemic ritual, or just a literal embodiment of the artists´ needs and desires or interests? We don't know. In the nearby cave at Lacroix, which is now closed, I have read that the original artists would have needed to crawl on their elbows and stomachs for over a hundred yards to reach the chamber of drawings. While easier to get to, the drawings at Chauvet are placed in a similarly peculiar location. Nothing is drawn at the mouth of the cave, the seemingly obvious and most convenient choice. Instead, the artists chose to draw further in, mostly at the very back, hidden in the depths. In other words, they would have needed to enter the potential home of a bear or lion and follow it to the very end, putting their lives unnecessarily at risk, just to draw or admire a few pictures. Why? If you require a logical explanation, you're unlikely to find one, since there isn't any logical reason to create the drawings in the first place. But even in that, in the unresolvable riddle of the drawings' existence, one feels a certain solidarity with the creators. The sense of mystery, the awe that comes over us as we look at their creations, is also their awe, their wonder, appreciation, and fear in the face of the non-human world. And just as they might not always have viewed themselves as part of that other world or, rather, feared their small place in it, their insignificance, so we too are fearful of our connection or lack of connection to them, to the primitive, to a people who lived alongside cave lions and wooly mammoths and saber tooth tigers and wolves double the size of what we know today, who may have worshiped bear, who hunted their own food and on a daily basis had cause to reflect upon their relationship to the non human world around them, a world much greater than themselves and beyond comprehension. Perhaps to mitigate the distance between themselves and their environment, to feel less small in their surroundings, they took to depicting some of the outer forces on cave walls, trying maybe to align themselves with those forces if not to control them, bringing cracks of light into the cave's overwhelming figurative and literal darkness. In such an act, we can better imagine ourselves reflected in the drawings, as we too try to come to terms with forces beyond our control and beyond our comprehension, with a past we have lost connection with. The drawings render us fatuous, and, drawn in by their mystery, we rediscover the same kinship with the artists that the artists may have sought with the objects of their drawings. As understanding fails, communion deepens.