Cave of forgotten dreams
di // pubblicato il 28 Novembre, 2011
- Translated by Patrizia Cani -
Special event of the 52nd edition of the Festival of Peoples, the latest film by Werner Herzog “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” is a journey through time to an inaccessible and forbidden place that preserves in the dark the very essence of the human spirit.
On December 18 in 1994, the speleologist Jean-Marie Chauvet, accompanied by his friends Eliette Brunel and Christian Hillaire, made a trip by the river Ardeche in southern France. Following a rough path attached to the cliff of the mountain the three sensed an air flow coming from a narrow slit, pushed aside some rocks and went down into the unknown.
Descending in the darkness they reached a cave that about 20.000 years ago has been sealed by the collapse of a massive rocky block. On the inside as well as a breathtaking natural landscape, the three found the most remote rock paintings of human history, dating back to 32.000 years ago, at least double older than those previously known.
The enormous scientific importance of the discovery was immediately apparent, since the next day the access to the cave was immediately banned to the public and sealed with a heavy steel door in order to protect the internal microclimate from any possible alteration.
In the famous cave of Lascaux, open to mass tourism already in the 50s, the breath of visitors was just enough to generate molds that have damaged the paintings.
A restricted team of archaeologists, art historians, geologists and paleontologists had the exclusive availability of access to the Chauvet Cave, so named in tribute to its discoverer, to carry out studies and surveys according to an actual calendar of events.
The director Werner Herzog, accustomed to challenges in inaccessible places, (suffice to think about the ship actually carried in the Amazon jungle in his “Fitzcarraldo”), obtained from the French Ministry of Culture the permission to shoot the film in the cave, making the incomparable works of art visible to the world.
The physical limits imposed by the well through which you enter the cave and strict rules to protect the integrity of what can be considered the oldest art gallery in the world, have strongly influenced the project. The film was shot with non-professional cameras by a crew composed by just four people, using the 3D which eventually acquire its precise raison d'etre.
Herzog was against the use of stereoscopic technologies and was almost forced to convert to them by the filmmakers. The talented director of the photography Peter Zeitlinger bypassed the physical limits shooting over twenty minutes with two video cameras the size of a matches packet held together by cellotape.
The result is the most amazing view in three dimensions that I have ever seen, because it allows us to see the volumes of the painted walls with which the palaeolithic artists have interacted, taking advantage of bumps and hollows of the rock.
The freshness of the colors remained intact in the sealed environment makes it difficult to believe that they are there for such a humanly inconceivable time. Only the veil of sparkling calcite formed over thousands of years that covers them is the guarantee that it can not be counterfeited.
The imprint of a hand so shockingly similar to mine crosses every abyss of time and leads to identification.
I wonder if some primordial molecule pertaining to that being so similar to me still live in the biology of my body.
In a natural universe in which everything turns, dies and regenerates, me and that far ancestor are made of the same material, the same spirit.
Our feeble lives are only a blink in the face of the incomprehensible time that separates us, but that primary need to paint the world to communicate through time our visual emotions is the same that pervades both of us.
The arts as a universal language exceeds the limit of every tongue and hands down information about the species disappeared from the European fauna such as mammoths, rhinos, and European lions without mane.
For this reason the testimony of the emotional trauma and oniric regression experienced by the archaeologist Julien Monney, a former circus performer who at the first visit spent five days in the cave, is the most emotionally engaging part of the film.
"It's not me, is the spirit that dwells in me". Such is the Aboriginal response to the Western question about the reason of these painting's execution. It expresses the simplicity of the synthesis that modern man has largely forgotten, his current inability to stop and hear the breath of the world.
"We live prisoners of time, they were not!" Reflects out loud in the comments of Werner Herzog's film.
Admiring the results of that creative freedom, these wonderful cave paintings that naturally emerge intact from the darkness of millennia is a touching emotion.
The spiritual communion to these artists of the Paleolithic, so similar to us in a completely different world, is perhaps what led a huge crowd to the cinema, forcing the Festival of Peoples to a second screening to meet the unscheduled crowds remained outside waiting.
We hope that some Italian distributor will soon enter “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” in its list, because the abovementioned is not just a movie, it's also an amazing journey, a cosmic experience to the very essence of human being.
It is possible to take a virtual tour of the cave on the corporate website maintained by the Ministry of Culture or through the description of the English sculptor John Robinson published by the Bradshaw Foundation.
Eventually the film reveals the presence of a nuclear power plant just 35 km from the cave of Chauvet and spreads a thrill of terror in reminding everyone of the impermanence of all things.