We are locked in history
My poor photo of one of the posters
My title is one of the particularly memorable lines from Werner Herzog’s new film Cave of Forgotten Dreams, which I went to see last week. I was overwhelmed by the cave paintings that are the films focus. The caves in question are the Chauvet caves in Southern France. They contain the oldest cave paintings known to man – started at least 32,000 years ago – and have been sealed from the world, first by a rock slide, and latterly by a metal door put there to preserve them from tourists. This means that Herzog’s film is probably the only opportunity most of us will have ever to see these marvels.
The film is shot in 3D with an evocative soundtrack, and a voice over from Herzog, which is often bizarre but largely thought provoking. In the cinema you get a real sense of the caves: the cathedral-like quality of the strange rock formations, stalagmites and stalactites which have developed over centuries; the incredible stillness within the caves contrasted with the sense of movement in the paintings. The horses, rhinos and lions featured look incredibly fresh and the colours and marks are vibrant. This makes the impact of the industrial, steel walkway placed there to protect the cave floor all the more stark, and makes it the more surprising that Herzog doesn’t comment on this juxtaposition of materials. He instead draws comparisons between the paintings and ‘proto-cinema’ (an interesting but dubious comment), between the people who painted them and the scientists studying the cave, between art and science more generally, and most disjointedly comparisons with a group of albino crocodiles that live in a nearby wildlife centre.
It is, however, the quiet beauty of these ancient paintings which I took away from the film. 32,000 years is a time span I can only begin to comprehend, and yet they are as recognisable and appealing to us in the twenty-first century as they would have been then. Herzog’s slightly whimsical statement couldn’t be more apt for these paintings and how we see them: we are locked in history, history is locked in them, and the paintings themselves are now locked away with their history.