The Old Ones

Imagine hiking in rocky hills, a place you're familiar with, trails you've trod many times. But on this day's walk you see something out of place. A section of rock has crumbled, perhaps due to a storm or a tremor, revealing a shadow on the slope, perhaps an opening. You climb up to the spot, hoisting yourself over a fallen tree, and realize it is indeed an opening. You dig a flashlight from your day pack and slip through the narrow gap of rock. Nothing much, really, it seems at first, but you're jittery with the excitement of something new and possibly dangerous. Then a bend in the gap of rock opens into a cavern and your flashlight reveals walls covered with paintings comparable in quality to masterworks of the modern age. The paintings turn out to be 30,000 years old.

This, in effect, is what happened in 1994 when three speleologists --  Eliette Brunel-Deschamps, Christian Hillaire, and Jean-Marie Chauvet -- acting on a tip from another spelunker, Michel Rosa, explored a newly opened cave in southern France. It has come to be known as Chauvet Cave and it contains some of the most astonishing prehistoric art ever found.

The images stir the imagination, certainly my own, and that of filmmaker Werner Herzog. His movie, "Cave of Forgotten Dreams," offers a fascinating and close view of the paintings, showing the mastery of form and pigment and the way the artist(s) used the textures and shapes of the rock to bring the forms to life. There's a 3-D version which I did not get to see.

The paintings are a record of a different world, a world where humans lived on par with other creatures and, as the images suggest, in awe of them. Not so much cowed, it seems to me (fearful and respectful, yes) but proud to be part of the great tapestry of life where humanity isn't necessarily the most elevated or important thing. It's telling there are no images of people in the cave art. Why?

I like the way Herzog tackles the inscrutable. Films like "Fitzcarraldo," "Grizzly Man" and "Encounters at the End of the World" are good examples. He can be harsh and condescending at times toward the people who populate his movies, I think largely because he's irritated by the knowingness they pretend to have in the face of phenomena much bigger than they are.

In "Cave of Forgotten Dreams," Herzog visits a researcher trying to put together how the people populating Europe 30,000 years ago might have lived. It's clear Herzog isn't impressed and the interview concludes with the researcher's clumsy efforts to use a spear-thrower. 

I think Herzog's point is that all the technical sophistication and academic abstraction brought to bear by the scientists is ultimately less interesting than the art itself.  It can seem trivial compared to the potent mind of the artist who is speaking to us from so long ago.