Cave of Forgotten Dreams: This enchanting study of the 32,000 year-old cave paintings at Chauvet Pont d'Arc is the apotheosis of Herzog's perennial landscape-as-mindscape theme, exploring the interiority of the earth itself, with much attendant hypothesizing. Beautiful (in 3D!) and powerful in a cumulative sort of way, with superbly evocative music. The usual sprinkling of flute-playing, bone-sniffing oddballs who usually enable Herzog's strategy of ironic defense can't deflect us any more from recognizing his personal fixation on the mystical and sublime.
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
SFIFF54: 'Cave of Forgotten Dreams'
Cave of Forgotten Dreams: This enchanting study of the 32,000 year-old cave paintings at Chauvet Pont d'Arc is the apotheosis of Herzog's perennial landscape-as-mindscape theme, exploring the interiority of the earth itself, with much attendant hypothesizing. Beautiful (in 3D!) and powerful in a cumulative sort of way, with superbly evocative music. The usual sprinkling of flute-playing, bone-sniffing oddballs who usually enable Herzog's strategy of ironic defense can't deflect us any more from recognizing his personal fixation on the mystical and sublime.
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Loved this film which opened commercially last Friday May 6th. The cave -- which was sealed and untouched by landslides for tenth of thousends of years -- is beautiful, breathtaking, with everything inside, from animal bones to the floor cave, covererd in a thin layer of crystal deposits that glow in the dark. It gives this majestic space a other-worldly appearence, forgotten and embalmed in time. Perhaps that is exactly what it is, a place so remote to us, humans beings of the 21st Century, that it doen't belong to this world. Not only the place itself, but the people that inhabited the caves are absolutely distant to us. As Herzog points out during his narration on the film, the homo sapiens living there where "not trapped in history" as we all are now.
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