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| Cave of Forgotten Dreams |
Cave of Forgotten
Dreams (2010)
Cellist Ernst Reijseger, swaddles Herzog’s documentary in an
ethereal & mesmeric score, allowing the director’s typically evocative
commentary to drift up effortlessly, out from the very caves and crevices that
he films with such awe and precision. Reijseger’s
score is important, because, as with most of Herzog’s documentaries, the
atmosphere that Herzog evokes invariably incubates the impressions that his
subject matter generates, and Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc must have been something close
to Herzog’s ideal subject matter. 20,000 years in the making and virtually
unexposed to mankind, these caves are steeped in the accumulated mystery of
millennia, still barely understood and filled to bursting with meaning and
anthropological ramification. Herzog loves it to be big, overwhelming, heavy
and difficult to pin down. Empiricism is not his forte; rather, he’s more
likely to be found extrapolating the meaning of mankind’s existence through the
erratic behavior of a penguin on an empty ice shelf in Antarctica [Encounters at the End of the World] or a moonwalker dancing on the edge of
a cliff beside a waterfall in Guyana [The
White Diamond].
No one makes a documentary quite like Herzog does. The
spaces that he cordons off for the purposes of spontaneity and discovery are almost
unprecedented in documentary filmmaking, and in the hands of a less adept director
such elliptical methods would certainly result in a travesty of imprecision and
disinformation. But Herzog invariably pulls it off. Certainly the result can
border on the bizarre; but the cave paintings and skulls, the stalagmites reverberating
with the tapping splash of distant, dripping water, the obsessive scientists
and curious local mystics—both of whom he treats equally and respectfully—these
are all the diverse components of exceedingly bizarre matters, and so his
methodology seems somehow fitting.
-FYI-
The trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZFP5HfJPTY
Director: Werner Herzog
Cast: Werner Herzog, Dominique Baffier, Jean Clottes, Jean-Michel Geneste, Carole Fritz, Gilles Tosello, Michel Philippe, Julien Monney, Nicholas Conard, Charles Fathy
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