CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS (2010) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Werner Herzog
Werner Herzog introduces you to the world's oldest discovered art - cave paintings found in France in the 1990s, dating back some 30,000 years. The paintings are so accomplished, and so well-preserved, you wonder how they could possibly be authentic. With their realistic shadings and sense of proportion, and the contours of the cave walls providing an extra dimension and sometimes even the illusion of movement, they don't seem primitive at all. Herzog, viewing them with a filmmaker's eye and shooting them with a 3-D camera, even suggests that one eight-legged beast could be an example of "proto-cinema." The movie leaves you with a sense of amazement and a lot of unanswered questions. Like, how did the artists who painted the lions and leopards and rhinos and mammoths get close enough, while the animals were presumably still breathing, to get the look just right? The miracle's not just that the paintings survived into the current millennium. It's that the Stone-Age Gauguins and Picassos who created them survived their own research.
