What Are Our Forgotten Dreams?

We just saw “Cave of Forgotten Dreams”, Werner Herzog’s film of the earliest known cave art.  Over 30,000 years ago humans created fabulous drawings in the Chauvet caves of southern France.  Herzog’s film brilliantly illuminates, even in dim light, this treasure.

Like many movie-goers I have been subjected to 3-D technology before.  With the cheesy 3-D glasses and filmmakers’ attempts to pull their audience into chases and fights, or force them to dodge thrown projectiles, even such beautifully crafted films as Avatar left my head achy.  For me, at least, the 3-D technology not only was wasted but a bit annoying.

Not so in “Cave”.  We walked into the film just as it was starting, a result of the wrong show time having been printed in the local paper.  For future reference, the very slow ticket-taker at the theater advised, if there is a conflict between the newspaper and online we should believe the info online.  

I first noticed the screen was blurry as we found our seats in the darkened theater.  Reluctantly putting my 3-D glasses on, the film stayed blurry for a few moments.  Then, sort of like plugging my i-Phone into my new laptop, my brain registered the 3-D glasses as a new device: I suddenly started to see in 3-D.  This film with these glasses was plug and play apparently.

The cave art literally is awe-inspiring.  Very quickly I could imagine early humans dancing by flickering firelight as the horses, lions, bison and bears pictured on the cave walls moved and told stories. The beautiful renditions of a variety of animals had been drawn on the contours of caves so effectively utilizing the shapes of the cave walls that by the shifting lights (the filmmakers had been allowed to use only non-heat emitting lighting for filming the interior of the caves) many of the animals appeared animated and moving.  Maybe this really was the earliest attempt at motion pictures. 

The cave artists from the Paleolithic period lived in what is now southern France when glaciers covered much of that part of the world.  Based on tools and weapons from this period, these early humans very likely hunted many of the animals depicted on the cave walls.  The early humans no doubt dressed in the animals’ fur, ate their meat and used their bones for tools.  But what did they believe?  What did they hope for?  Did they draw the animals out of reverence, for religious rituals, or to entertain during a long cold winter?

The only drawing of a human-like figure in the caves is of the lower half of a woman’s seated body combined with that of an animal’s upper body.  One of the scientists speculated this drawing demonstrated the cave artists’ mythical or religious beliefs that the spirit world and the physical world were easily traversed.

Maybe so.  But I’m not at all sure what the filmmaker was trying to say about the nearby nuclear power plants and albino crocodiles living in a warm biosphere created as a result of the warm water resulting from the power plants.  I do wonder what a future generation 30,000 years hence might make of a wildly decorated Gallopalooza horse or an episode from a reality TV show, if those and humankind survive, that long.