Lastnight something of a personal milestone – my first 3D film. Though secretly I’d hoped to see some explosive blockbuster, we went down to the Renoir at Russell Square to see the late showing of Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams.
The Chauvet Cave, discovered in 1994, is home to the earliest paintings known anywhere on earth. Beautifully drawn Rhinos and Elephants and Horses thirty thousand years old, interspersed with bear scratches, and the drip drip of cliff-water that slowly encases everything in a calcite coating.
The small crew, four including Herzog himself, were reverential to the point of shaking; the cave will never be open to visitors, and there was a strong sense that this was perhaps the only chance a film crew would be allowed access. We feel vicariously the weight of expectation upon them.
It is an experience that’s physical in the looming walls and thrown shadows, the images bulge, as wide-eyed and crane-necked as we are.
Over the course of the day aspects of the film have drifted in and out of my imagination. It is almost a sequence of defining images, but somehow none were as affecting as this one: At the back of the cave, where carbon dioxide levels are so high to only allow a few minutes of access, Herzog’s guide points out a rock column that hangs from the ceiling, rendered with the only representation of human form found on this site – a woman depicted from the waist down being consumed by a bison, becoming the bison. Nowhere is the thrill and limitation of this film so clearly defined. From the narrow walkway on which the crew must remain only half of this image is visible, the other behind in darkness - tantalisingly close - but nevertheless impossible to (ever) see. The film presses desperately at these barriers, tries to stretch them, but returns each time unfulfilled. We are reminded momentarily that we are not in the cave.
The film ends with an unusual postscript that spins the whole thing further from the straight documentary format, (closer in fact to other of Herzog's works) Belching chimneys fill the screen as we are told that a few miles away from the cave is France’s biggest nuclear power station, the steam it produces used to heat a tropical biosphere where crocodiles thrive. A line is drawn between the cave and the biosphere; its inhabitants – including pink-eyed albinos – and us. A curious, ominous closing.
