I saw Werner Herzog's documentary "Cave of Forgotten Dreams" last night in Burbank. In short: GO! And see it in 3-D.
3-D, you say? Yes, 3-D. Who knew Herzog would thrive in a medium that gave us "Creature of the Black Lagoon" and "JAW 3-D"? (Though I am grateful that he didn't make "Grizzly Man" in more than two dimensions.)
I'm not at all a proponent of the new 3-D craze. I haven't seen a single one of the latest spate of 3-D action movies where I thought the film benefitted from 3-D. (No, not even 'Avatar'. Sorry, Navi fans.) You'll usually see me at the box office paying for the 2-D version and railing that the 3-D revival is just a fad - and a way of charging $16 a ticket. (Really, I think the technique has never been better than when it was a delightfully cheesy gimmick: "LOOK OUT! The Gill-Man popped right out of the screen!").
But "Cave" has convinced me otherwise. From the first moment the camera travels through the planted rows of a field in France as dust kicks up out of the screen and into your eyes, the 3-D gives the world of the film a roundness and a texture that would be missing otherwise.
And that's especially great when Herzog gets to the cave itself: the French cave of Chauvet, where in 1995 explorers discovered the oldest cave paintings known to man - which are some 32,000 years old.
I'll repeat: thirty-two thousand years old.
The paintings themselves are things of incredible beauty, simplicity - and modernity. They could have popped off of sketchpads from Picasso or Calder. And they're not just sketches or cartoons, either: the artist(s) depicted animals with specificity: mouths open, horses whinny and gallop, lions flirt and slink and growl. There's even the earliest known painting of a human figure: a half-woman, half-bison figure.
We watch as the walls are illuminated by the lights of Herzog's crew, as they would have been illuminated by the torches of humans who lived before history began. As the flickering lights wash across the walls of the cave, the animals gain roundness and shape. As the lights wane, the animals recede into darkness - into the shadows of the cave itself.
So the art isn't just the paintings... but also the way they appear on the textured cave walls, and the way they seem to move in the light - making Herzog's case that the paintings are themselves a kind of "proto-cinema". They are, literally, the world's earliest 3-D moving pictures.
Which is why the 3-D is so appealing and so attractive and (I would argue) so necessary here: the added dimension allows the cave to be seen in its full glory, and the art to be seen in its full roundness. The cave artists, whoever they were, used the natural features of the cave itself to give shape and depth to the creatures they painted: rocky protuberances form the round haunches of lions, a jutting stone becomes a bulbous mammoth head - and from behind a jutting overhang like a parted curtain a pony canters from the darkness. Herzog lets his camera (and our eyes) slide around the curves and explore the crags and angles.
I found the experience hypnotic, and could have stayed much longer in the cave. (My friend Itai felt it was ponderous and, at 90 minutes, about 70 minutes too long - but then again, Itai also called "Grizzly Man" the "funniest movie ever made." So perhaps I am more susceptible to Herzog's craggy charms.)
Still, I defy you not to feel a chill in a darkened theater, peering at Herzog and co. in a darkened cave as they slowly move their lights across a pockmarked wall to show a wall of red handprints. A scientist guide explains that the handprints were all made by one single person - and we can know this because of his distinctively crooked little finger. The film closes with a torchlit image of the handprint, a record of someone who left his mark so long ago, but who still reaches out to us through time and space, and now across the screen.
(Oh, and there are gill men of a sort: there's also a brief cameo by mutant albino crocodiles swimming near a nuclear power plant. They appear somewhat mystifyingly, when Herzog is grasping for something ineffable - but I liked them, too, and I'm enjoying chewing over how they fit in this movie, or what Herzog is using them to signify.)
So go. And go in 3-D when you can, where you can. It's a spelunking trip well with your $16 bucks.
[ed note: for more on this film, see David Licata's post: Why You Should See Cave of Forgotten Dreams.]
