Wavey Cavey

'Cave of Forgotten Dreams' (Werner Herzog, 2010)

A cave is discovered in 1994 in a secluded part of southern France. It is found to contain paintings, in fact the oldest paintings ever found. 16 years later Werner Herzog is allowed exclusive permission to film there in short and restricted sessions for a one-off series of shoots over a few Spring weeks in order to make a feature documentary.

The exterior landscape of the region surrounding the cave find is like something out of Caspar David Friedrich, romanticism light and splendour; the interior landscape is a time capsule, untouched in over 20,000 years, and now safeguarded from the outside and analysed from carefully installed gangways by a group of scientists nicely prone to French intellectual whimsy.

I’m always drawn to primitive imagery, fluidity and audacity of mark making – the merging of abstraction, figuration and stylisation – so scanning across the images themselves is the highlight of this film. Herzog has eccentrically decided to film in 3D, and I think there are signs that he wanted the humour of this to be on the screen. There are no speedboats flying towards us, or disembodied eyeballs wobbling through the air at us (Jaws - 3D was the last time I saw a 3D film, though I've heard that the Piranha remake is destined to become a classic - we'll have to see if Herzog makes a bikini film), but what works in this format is quite funny in itself. There is a certain frisson in the camera’s gliding over the textured cave floor. But elsewhere it is a distraction (hands flap strobingly in and out of the primary plane of vision from off camera), a colour deadener, a tonal nuisance – wearing shades in doors? I’m not fuckin Bono.

The illusion of depth perception using 3D mostly reminded me of those miniature theatrical dioramas made of card with foreground, background and other elements slotting one in front of the other, essentially a series of 2D cut-outs staged at different distances. On-stage you may need ‘flats’ but on screen they appear more artificially rendered than normal moving images. ‘Normal’ cinematography in combination with the wonderfully complex and imaginative organ that is the human eye (actually a pair of them helps) and you don’t need 3D. Some moments come off like a piss-take of 3D effects, woah! - a prominent upthrust chin; oooh! – a paleontologist’s unconvincing spear-thrusts at the camera.

The choice of 3D acts (knowingly, I think) as a compliment to the spatial representations of the cave art, and I think that this is a deliberate parallel being drawn (favourably to the art that has endured) between the faddish marvel of 3D in cinemas and home entertainment and the first representational realism in mark-making. Presenting the first and the latest together, tools of prehistory and the tools of modernity, which gets the plaudits? These technologies, separated by 35,000 years, one resonates and endures, the other distracts faddishly. The movement and energy in the lines on a cave wall pisses all over the overlapping stage-flats of 3D. The interplay of plane and depth through flickering torchlit images on a contoured cave wall with (or versus) 3D mechanical artifice. The very term 3D is misleading - the stereoscopic holographic visual effect of seeing different angles of an object to form a complete view of it is not acheived in my opinion - just overlapping flatnesses.

With my painter’s brain engaged, I wondered whether I’d have hacked it as a paleolithic muralist. You could see how the raw materials and the sensibility of the artist combine, and the skill of the artists, some collaborating 28,000 years ago with their predecessors of 35,000 years ago (coming back for the remake 7,000 years after the original). The contours of the cave wall, informing the sense of line and negative space, in dialogue with bear-scratch scraffito, charcoal chiaroscuro. The paintings all depict animals, recognisable and descriptive of a Disney-fest of biodiversity in the region – wooly mammoth and rhino, lions, antelopes, bison, wild horses. The artists saw everything side-on (reminded me of ambidextrous golfers lining up a putt, seeing all putts as curving inward), in silhouette but not static, in the side-on directionality there is movement, legs straining in fight, or multiplying in flight. Side-on chosen as the best aspect for this directionality and to capture the essence of the depicted beasties; an artistic choice like a film director's choice of camera angle and framing.

The thought occurs to me too that sports TV in 3D generally features men running sideways across the screen (pointless in 3D). The prehistoric celebration of bestial prowess in side-on action on these cave walls compares well on nearly every level (we just don't know the score is all) to modern satellite TV-driven worship of athleticism and rugged ball-hoofage.

In another section of wall, there are red dots, palmprints of one abstract colourist. Was this audacious and profound, the marks of an independent? What artistic freedom did these artists get? - were they commissioned illustrators, rebels, specialised outsiders inside their tribe, shamans channeling the spirits of the natural world that they pictured? Again, and again, the answer is that we just don't know. The evidence of the work on the wall though: stylization, figuration, abstraction, painting (tone), drawing (line) – it’s all there. What seems remarkable to me is what isn't there: that in the gallery of primitivism in these examples there are no childlike scribblings, stickmen or random daubs. Though I enjoy the ego-less simplicity in that sort of imagery, this cave art is sophisticated and relatively refined. Most impressively, whatever the merits of primitivism vs. sophistication, it is just bloody marvellous that the earliest paintings ever found aren’t a load of crap – must have been a relief to all.

I enjoyed the various interview segments too and Herzog’s own deadpan narration. The interviewed experts, intellectual specialists all (nearly all) are not po-faced (I wondered what the film would have been like if they’d made this momentous discovery in Yorkshire), and halfway in it takes a comedic turn, with progressively more eccentric takes on analysing these cave paintings. The master-perfumer–cum-cavity-sniffer (the aroma is attenuated don’t you know), and the experimental archaeologist-cum-eskimo-flautist-novelty-act. Through them the film cleverly acknowledges how art, archaeology, history, cinema (culture!) centre on interpretation and individual response – the isolated personal finite meaning of an artefact (whether a product of cameras, eye and hand) is intangible, how the impulse to explore and invest meaning in the world must be close to the meaning of humanness. These all seem to add up to "how little we really know, how much to marvel at”. ...er, I hope that didn't sound Creationist at all...

I like a fanciful metaphor in a philosophical summation as much as the next man (in fact, quite a bit more than the next man I reckon), and Herzog pulls out a beaut in asking the question in reference to the mirror of prehistory provided by these cave finds, that was on nobody’s lips exactly: wondering whether we are like mutant albino crocodiles dreaming our imaginary reflections in that cave… Nice one Werner!

We don’t know what the paleolithic artists intended or what was in their mind when they painted these images (‘Did they cry at night?’ Herzog wonders) – but that gap in knowledge encourages us to pour our own thoughts and theories, dreams and wonder into them. That’s humanness and probably mutant-albino-crocodile-ness too for that matter.