WERNER HERZOG
DIRECTOR/MENTOR/CAVEMAN
TEXT BY TOM RIDGWAY
In 1987, Werner Herzog made Cobra Verde, his last feature film with Klaus Kinski; over the next two decades he turned almost entirely to documentaries. The films - including Little Dieter Wants to Fly and Grizzly Man - seemed to be a way of recovering from those years with the exhausting Kinski and their accompanying lunacy. Then in 2006, he made Rescue Dawn with Christian Bale, and last year, Bad Lieutenant with Nicolas Cage, two actors who are perhaps as close you could get to Kinski's intensity in our strait-laced times. (In the latter he also managed to turn a bad film into a mad film). Along the way, he also became a kind of mentor to Harmony Korine. Suddenly, after years in the wilderness (literally in the case of Grizzly Man), Werner Herzog is again a man in demand.
Which might explain why the French ministry of culture allowed him to make his new documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams inside the Chauvet cave system in southeastern France (normally off-limits to all but a handful of researchers), home to an astonishing collection of Palaeothic art created over 30,000 years ago.
If you believe what Herzog says (and he's often warned listeners not to), then the paintings brought back a childhood fascination. "My intellectual, my spiritual awakening was in a way connected to Palaeolithic cave paintings. At age 12, I spotted a book in the display window of a bookstore with a picture of a horse from the Lascaux cave on it, and an indescribable excitement took hold of me: I wanted this book, I had to have it. It took more than half a year, until I could buy and open the book, and the shudder of awe and wonder has never left me." By the end of Cave of Forgotten Dreams and its exploration of the cave's sublime art, you'll probably share those feelings.
Despite a well-founded scepticism about the technique, Herzog shot the film in 3D and it proves an inspired choice. The closed frame created naturally by the caves heightens the feeling of depth given by 3D and for once you experience the genuinely immersive experience so often promised by 3D's proponents and so often broken by the witless blockbusters which have used it. Of course, it helps that what you see on the walls - these "images of long-forgotten dreams," as Herzog calls them - is astonishing.
The 13 different animal species in the paintings are not only startling in their grace and vivacity, but also have a realist muscularity that Western art perhaps didn't again achieve until the 16th century. Watch the rhinoceroses, antelopes, bison and leopards emerge from and disappear back into the shadows, as they would have done in the light of Palaeolithic fires, and they seem to come to life, careering across the walls, running and charging each other around the undulating caves. These images may be 30,000 years old, but it's hard to disagree with Herzog when he calls the pictures "almost a form of proto-cinema."
The film screened to great acclaim at the Berlin Film Festival in February - though Herzog didn't appear, deciding at the last minute to stay and work through a "very, very tense" phase on his work-in-progress on the death penalty: "I made the choice - I'm going to work and not celebrate," he said. It's released here on March 25th. For those Herzog fans who might become slightly worried that his obvious astonishment at the paintings has overwhelmed his usually dependably strange vision of our world, never fear: in an epilogue, he takes us to visit albino crocodiles living in a biosphere heated by the waste water of a nuclear power station, less than 20 miles from Chauvet. As two mutant reptiles approach each other and appear to kiss, he intones, "Nothing is real; nothing is certain." Except, you want to reply, the spectacular beauty of the art that lay hidden underground for over 20,000 years.
