Dreaming inside Werner Herzog's Cave

Some thirty-two thousand years ago, someone in Southern France entered a dark cave above the Ardèche River and, by the light of a torch, created meaning with a piece of charred pinewood. He or she certainly was not the first to do so, but from our benighted historical perspective, shaped by the absence of evidence, this cave painter now stands at a make-believe beginning—as the first known one of us to escape the daylight and embark on the representational life.

In Werner Herzog’s latest documentary, “The Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” the paintings from the toxic, radon-filled blackness of Chauvet cave feel like a blast of fresh air. That is, a blast of thirty-two-thousand-year-old fresh air. The paintings are more than twice as old as any other previously discovered cave painting. They were created at a time when Neanderthals and Homo sapiens still shared the frozen ground of Ice Age Europe.

Around twenty thousand years ago, the face of the limestone cliff above the river bed collapsed, effectively sealing off the cave from time — until 1994, when a group of explorers led by Jean-Marie Chauvet detected a small air shaft reaching up from the cave’s ceiling.

Inside, they found a time capsule of pristine beauty, one that offers us a tantalizingly dim view of life between thirty and twenty thousand years ago.

For ten thousand years, the cave’s galleries hosted a variety of artists. Some meticulously scratched away the surface of cave wall to a clean white canvas before filling it with delicately rendered charcoal- and sepia-toned depictions of horses, rhinoceroses, and lions. A later crooked-fingered artist adorned the walls with red ochre hand prints. Someone even painted the lower portion of a female human figure, in which a giant fertile-looking vagina grows into a furry bison head. And, in what is perhaps the earliest recorded act of art criticism, a curmudgeonly cave bear, upon encountering what then was already a five-thousand-year-old painting, ran his claws down the length of the work, as if to say, “You call this art?!”

With their deft lines, ingenious composition, and raw aesthetic verve, the images of Chauvet overwhelm you with the sheer duration of human cultural experience in its full symbolic richness. There is something heartening, even liberating, in contemplating this obvious truth. There is no human existence apart from culture, and our species’ existence is a long and varied, though fundamentally continuous, story that dwarfs our idea of history.

Herzog captures in moving (3D!) pictures the wonder of these suspended moments of human life from seemingly beyond the reach of time.  Seeing such vibrant, sophisticated evidence of life literally leap out at you from the unfathomable depths of the past is, to put it strangely, a visceral intellectual experience. The paintings in the cave serve as a sort of memento viviri: reducing the last five thousand years of our hand-wringing concerns to ephemera. I left the theater feeling dangerously light—as though my ninety-minute communion with primeval humanity had somehow unburdened me from the modern world.

Yet for all their radiance, the Chauvet paintings only heighten our awareness of the dark unknown in which our past is hidden.

Read the rest of this piece at Hypervocal.com