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Cave of Forgotten Dreams
I went to see Cave of Forgotten Dreams last night with Brother, in lieu of Early Music rehearsal, which I'm still missing, if not acutely, than with a dull ache and a sense of vague discomfort. I want to tell you this is the best movie I've seen this year and if you see one 3D movie this year, make it this one.... But as gorgeous and must-see as I found this, I expect some of you would get a headache or become bored or uncomfortable. It's okay. Herzog is not for everyone... however, if you're not going to see this film, I would encourage you to find whatever floats your boat and go do it. Creation demands nothing less.
After we got home (we had dinner afterwards) Brother thanked me for inviting him. "You enjoyed yourself?" I asked. "You understand why I like Werner Herzog and would go see another one of his films?"
"Oh, yes," Brother said. "Not only was it interesting and thoughtful and very funny, but Herzog is clearly a man who has figured out how to be himself in this world and make it work."
"And he gives that same dignity to other people," I added as we laughed over an interview where a man wearing 'ice age' Inuit furs plays the Star Spangled Banner on a paleolithic flute.
Because the movie was awe-inspiring and charming and quirky. And (like many Herzog films) extremely funny in its understated way. (There is another amusing scene where an anthropologist ineptly demonstrates a throwing spear, funny, but not in a jackass kind of way.)
But the reason to see this film is for the images: Ebert has often said of Herzog that he finds images that you will never see anywhere else. There is this scene in Invincible a film about a Jewish strong man who plays Samson rather than continue to wear his Aryan wig in Weimar Era variety show that has a scene of these bright red crabs crawling over each other. People have tripped all over themselves drawing out the potential symbolism of the scene that really has nothing to do with the rest of the film: about the rising tide of fascism or the coming holocaust. But Ebert points out regardless of its meaning (privately I associated it with Herzog's philosophy of the terrifying life force: the way life continues with indifference to the individual) that this is an image you will see nowhere else.
For me, perhaps the most 'profound' images was the footage from beneath the Antarctic ocean, teeming with life. I first encountered this in Wild Blue Yonder, in which he juxtaposes it with the emptiness of space. Later he returns to it in Encounters at the End of the World. Who can forget that steamship straining over the mountain in Fitzcarraldo (a film, oddly, which reminds me of my father). Or the opening shots of the conquistadors descending single file from the Andes in Aguirre and the Wrath of God. (There is an image in Aguirre of a boat in a tree latter borrowed by Coppola --- as is much of Aguirre --- for Apocalypse Now..) I could go on... almost every Herzog film has this moment when I see the world in a completely new way, when something is revealed to me that I've never seen before. (Thus far the only film --- and I haven't seen them all --- that I haven't liked has been his film on Gesualdo: which is amusing, since clearly Herzog and I share a taste for polyphony.)
I watch Herzog for these images. And because, like Brother, I recognize this is a person who has had to carve out his own niche. To take the outrageous risks to create something no one else would ever think of, much less attempt. He's not a daredevil, but he is a little mad. He is someone --- for all his supposed nihilism --- who is driven by a powerful creative force. At one point in the movie several people muse about the cave paintings saying that perhaps homo sapiens should be called homo spiritus (?) Since clearly we don't know anything at all and seem to have a drive to create religion. I sniffed at this, thinking that we could leave the religion out of it, that it's the creative force we should be grasping for: but then I realized for some of us there is little difference between the two.
I guess what was most striking to me about the film was the dimensionality of the paintings... this would be the reason to see it in 3D. But also their sophistication. This is not 'primitive' art, it is sophisticated in its form and shading... it's sense of movement and it's clear sense of line. This is not the work of amateurs. And that is what blew my mind: 30,000 years ago there were artists practiced enough in their craft to create these paintings.
"Isn't it funny how all those animals [Brother and I both laughed all evening over Herzog saying "wooly rhinoceros"] are now extinct, but there are still people?"
Brother gave me a funny look. Then I realized people now are to people then as the wooly rhinoceros is to the modern rhinoceros. The cave lion is to the lion on the savannah. The mammoth to the elephant. We are both closer and much further from those earlier people than we think.
But the best part of the movie really is the images. At one point one of the scientists commands silence, "Perhaps we will even hear our own heartbeats," he says. The music swells (I've always loved Herzog's soundtracks: he often commissions impromptu works for his films and has a keen fit for tone), but then, towards the end of the cave-painting montage he fades in the sound of a heartbeat. And at that moment, I realized the rhythm of the images and the music had synced my heartbeat to the one in the film: it was beating in sympathy to an identical rhythm.
I mention this because this is how the film felt for me: to be caught up in a kind of sympathetic viewing of the images, as though we were allowed to see with someone else's eyes, for a few hours, what we will never be allowed to see with our own. And I do not mind saying that some of the most beautiful images were those that had nothing to do with the cave paintings and were just gorgeous, crystalline, rock formations: some as delicate and transparent as piece of fabric in the breeze. Most the people in the theater just sat there and sighed.
Herzog could not resist tacking on his trademark doomsday device: a series of musings involving the albino alligators who have collected around the cooling ponds (more like tropical habitat) created by nuclear reactors upstream from the caves. I suspect this was unnecessary and it did skew the film, even if I was already thinking about time in terms of the half-life of spent nuclear fuel.
Last year I read John D'Agata's About a Mountain, which is in part about Yucca Mountain and the problem of nuclear storage. The book ends up being absurdly funny after it meanders through a history of the Las Vegas strip to end up with a bunch of philologists trying to figure out some kind of semiotic device that will last as long as the half-life of plutonium (roughly 10,000 years) and the absurdity of this task considering there are no materials that can stand up to that length of time, or symbols that will retain meaning for that length of time. From the book:
"... what we are likely to see... according to recent reports from the Dept. of Energy, is a small series of twenty-foot-high monuments at the site. They'll be carved in the shape of pyramids and made from local granite. On their surfaces will be inscriptions in English about the site [he's already established only 5% of the world's population speaks English. The world's most populous language: Mandarin: clocks in at 15%], plus the date the waste was buried, the date it will be safe, and a small engraved image in the apex of each stone that reproduces the anguished face from Edvard Munch's 'The Scream.'
'It's the most recognizable painting in the world,' said a DOE spokesman when I called to ask about it. 'Human culture will probably change dramatically over the next ten thousand years, but human emotions won't. So anyone who comes in contact with this face over the next ten millennia is going to understand what's up with this site, that there's something about it that's dangerous, scary, and likely to make them sick. I like the idea of a design that just gives the viewer a 'mood' but we're dealing with life and death here. The most responsible thing we can do in this case is give easily interpretable information. We're trying to help these people!'" (p179)
Even just writing this out again, I had to stop and cackle, especially when marrying this idea to one another one by Thomas Sebeok "America's leading expert in the field of semiotics" for an 'Atomic Priesthood': "'a long-term commission that would remain in service for the next ten millennia... self-selective in membership, independent of political currents, and licensed to use whatever devices for enforcement that may be at it's disposal... including those of a folkloristic nature." (p93)
The Chauvet Cave site was used for a period of up to 5000 years: we know, anyway, that humans interacted with it over that space of time. And now 30,000 years later here we are, again, but at the same time utterly mystified by its 'meaning' at least in any concrete way. I couldn't decide if this made me feel really hopeful about nuclear waste, or like this was the best absurdist comedy I'd seen in a very long time. In any case, without significant environmental adaptations albino alligators can't be expected to live very long in the wild... even if alligators more largely speaking, have humans utterly beat in terms of their ancient --- and relatively unchanging ---pedigree.
Still, what a marvelous gift, to be able to see these things... even if it is only in a second-hand way. I left feeling not only a profound sense of gratitude, to be allowed to see them, and to be living here and now. And amazed that these images act as a kind of focus, connecting us across the otherwise unimaginable distances of space and time.
After we got home (we had dinner afterwards) Brother thanked me for inviting him. "You enjoyed yourself?" I asked. "You understand why I like Werner Herzog and would go see another one of his films?"
"Oh, yes," Brother said. "Not only was it interesting and thoughtful and very funny, but Herzog is clearly a man who has figured out how to be himself in this world and make it work."
"And he gives that same dignity to other people," I added as we laughed over an interview where a man wearing 'ice age' Inuit furs plays the Star Spangled Banner on a paleolithic flute.
Because the movie was awe-inspiring and charming and quirky. And (like many Herzog films) extremely funny in its understated way. (There is another amusing scene where an anthropologist ineptly demonstrates a throwing spear, funny, but not in a jackass kind of way.)
But the reason to see this film is for the images: Ebert has often said of Herzog that he finds images that you will never see anywhere else. There is this scene in Invincible a film about a Jewish strong man who plays Samson rather than continue to wear his Aryan wig in Weimar Era variety show that has a scene of these bright red crabs crawling over each other. People have tripped all over themselves drawing out the potential symbolism of the scene that really has nothing to do with the rest of the film: about the rising tide of fascism or the coming holocaust. But Ebert points out regardless of its meaning (privately I associated it with Herzog's philosophy of the terrifying life force: the way life continues with indifference to the individual) that this is an image you will see nowhere else.
For me, perhaps the most 'profound' images was the footage from beneath the Antarctic ocean, teeming with life. I first encountered this in Wild Blue Yonder, in which he juxtaposes it with the emptiness of space. Later he returns to it in Encounters at the End of the World. Who can forget that steamship straining over the mountain in Fitzcarraldo (a film, oddly, which reminds me of my father). Or the opening shots of the conquistadors descending single file from the Andes in Aguirre and the Wrath of God. (There is an image in Aguirre of a boat in a tree latter borrowed by Coppola --- as is much of Aguirre --- for Apocalypse Now..) I could go on... almost every Herzog film has this moment when I see the world in a completely new way, when something is revealed to me that I've never seen before. (Thus far the only film --- and I haven't seen them all --- that I haven't liked has been his film on Gesualdo: which is amusing, since clearly Herzog and I share a taste for polyphony.)
I watch Herzog for these images. And because, like Brother, I recognize this is a person who has had to carve out his own niche. To take the outrageous risks to create something no one else would ever think of, much less attempt. He's not a daredevil, but he is a little mad. He is someone --- for all his supposed nihilism --- who is driven by a powerful creative force. At one point in the movie several people muse about the cave paintings saying that perhaps homo sapiens should be called homo spiritus (?) Since clearly we don't know anything at all and seem to have a drive to create religion. I sniffed at this, thinking that we could leave the religion out of it, that it's the creative force we should be grasping for: but then I realized for some of us there is little difference between the two.
I guess what was most striking to me about the film was the dimensionality of the paintings... this would be the reason to see it in 3D. But also their sophistication. This is not 'primitive' art, it is sophisticated in its form and shading... it's sense of movement and it's clear sense of line. This is not the work of amateurs. And that is what blew my mind: 30,000 years ago there were artists practiced enough in their craft to create these paintings.
"Isn't it funny how all those animals [Brother and I both laughed all evening over Herzog saying "wooly rhinoceros"] are now extinct, but there are still people?"
Brother gave me a funny look. Then I realized people now are to people then as the wooly rhinoceros is to the modern rhinoceros. The cave lion is to the lion on the savannah. The mammoth to the elephant. We are both closer and much further from those earlier people than we think.
But the best part of the movie really is the images. At one point one of the scientists commands silence, "Perhaps we will even hear our own heartbeats," he says. The music swells (I've always loved Herzog's soundtracks: he often commissions impromptu works for his films and has a keen fit for tone), but then, towards the end of the cave-painting montage he fades in the sound of a heartbeat. And at that moment, I realized the rhythm of the images and the music had synced my heartbeat to the one in the film: it was beating in sympathy to an identical rhythm.
I mention this because this is how the film felt for me: to be caught up in a kind of sympathetic viewing of the images, as though we were allowed to see with someone else's eyes, for a few hours, what we will never be allowed to see with our own. And I do not mind saying that some of the most beautiful images were those that had nothing to do with the cave paintings and were just gorgeous, crystalline, rock formations: some as delicate and transparent as piece of fabric in the breeze. Most the people in the theater just sat there and sighed.
Herzog could not resist tacking on his trademark doomsday device: a series of musings involving the albino alligators who have collected around the cooling ponds (more like tropical habitat) created by nuclear reactors upstream from the caves. I suspect this was unnecessary and it did skew the film, even if I was already thinking about time in terms of the half-life of spent nuclear fuel.
Last year I read John D'Agata's About a Mountain, which is in part about Yucca Mountain and the problem of nuclear storage. The book ends up being absurdly funny after it meanders through a history of the Las Vegas strip to end up with a bunch of philologists trying to figure out some kind of semiotic device that will last as long as the half-life of plutonium (roughly 10,000 years) and the absurdity of this task considering there are no materials that can stand up to that length of time, or symbols that will retain meaning for that length of time. From the book:
"... what we are likely to see... according to recent reports from the Dept. of Energy, is a small series of twenty-foot-high monuments at the site. They'll be carved in the shape of pyramids and made from local granite. On their surfaces will be inscriptions in English about the site [he's already established only 5% of the world's population speaks English. The world's most populous language: Mandarin: clocks in at 15%], plus the date the waste was buried, the date it will be safe, and a small engraved image in the apex of each stone that reproduces the anguished face from Edvard Munch's 'The Scream.'
'It's the most recognizable painting in the world,' said a DOE spokesman when I called to ask about it. 'Human culture will probably change dramatically over the next ten thousand years, but human emotions won't. So anyone who comes in contact with this face over the next ten millennia is going to understand what's up with this site, that there's something about it that's dangerous, scary, and likely to make them sick. I like the idea of a design that just gives the viewer a 'mood' but we're dealing with life and death here. The most responsible thing we can do in this case is give easily interpretable information. We're trying to help these people!'" (p179)
Even just writing this out again, I had to stop and cackle, especially when marrying this idea to one another one by Thomas Sebeok "America's leading expert in the field of semiotics" for an 'Atomic Priesthood': "'a long-term commission that would remain in service for the next ten millennia... self-selective in membership, independent of political currents, and licensed to use whatever devices for enforcement that may be at it's disposal... including those of a folkloristic nature." (p93)
The Chauvet Cave site was used for a period of up to 5000 years: we know, anyway, that humans interacted with it over that space of time. And now 30,000 years later here we are, again, but at the same time utterly mystified by its 'meaning' at least in any concrete way. I couldn't decide if this made me feel really hopeful about nuclear waste, or like this was the best absurdist comedy I'd seen in a very long time. In any case, without significant environmental adaptations albino alligators can't be expected to live very long in the wild... even if alligators more largely speaking, have humans utterly beat in terms of their ancient --- and relatively unchanging ---pedigree.
Still, what a marvelous gift, to be able to see these things... even if it is only in a second-hand way. I left feeling not only a profound sense of gratitude, to be allowed to see them, and to be living here and now. And amazed that these images act as a kind of focus, connecting us across the otherwise unimaginable distances of space and time.