Cave of Forgotten Dreams
Jun. 22nd, 2011 12:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficI went to see Cave of Forgotten Dreams at the IFC last night. Thing the first: If you are going to see this, see it in 3D. I'm not even kidding. I hate 3D, and there's some hand held camera stuff in this that will give you a headache, and some weirdly striated stuff that will make your eyes cross, but you still need to see it in 3D so you see the shape of the cave. I've seen flat images of the paintings, and it really doesn't capture the space at all.
The Chauvet Cave in France contains the oldest paintings known to exist. They are around 35,000 years old. Because of the delicate nature of the caves, and the unimaginable value of them, only a handful of scientists will ever be allowed to enter them. This film is quite possible the only time they will be captured on film. So, since you're not ever going to be able to see them for themselves, this is the closest you'll ever get.
There's about an hour of footage in the movie just panning around the caves, showing the paintings, and the stalactites and stalagmites, and the cave bear skulls, some of which have been completely encased in calcite. It is awe-inspiring.
Unfortunately, the movie is an hour and a half. I suppose it would be boring to just pan slowly around the caves for the whole time, so he intersperses footage of the caves with random crap. Like a brief interlude with a perfumer who wanders around pressing his face to rocks, trying to sniff out other caves.
The problem is Herzog is not actually interested in the science at all. Or, really, the history. He's interested in the woo-woo primitive man connection with the spirit world. He interviews scientists but interrupts them when they talk about science to ask them about their dreams. You will not learn anything about paleolithic man watching this film. You will learn a teeny bit about the ice age. But you will also hear Herzog's completely bizarre ramblings about radioactive alligators.
Yes, for those of you that saw the Colbert interview, there are albino alligators. Twenty miles from the caves is a nuclear power plant. The hot water run-off from the plant, resulting from the cooling system, is used to heat a nearby tropical biodome. Where there are alligators. Some of which are albino. They are not, however, radioactive. Herzog seems to have missed the part where albinism is a naturally occuring mutation, it's just that albino alligators die in the wild. The prey sees them coming. So his rambly bit about alligators taking over Southern France and what will they think of the caves? IDEK. It's an artificial environment, dude. Alligators are not about to break out and crawl a mile into some cave.
Also, he does mention the phonebook thing in the movie, and that, at least, makes sense. He's talking to a scientist who is part of a project that has made a hyper-accurate laser map of the cave system. Herzog's point, in saying that you can look at the Manhattan phonebook and not know if those people cry or dream at night, is that this scientific catologuing of the minutae of the cave is besides the point and tells us nothing about the people who painted there. I disagree with him about the utility of such endeavors, but the analogy at least makes sense.
The fundamental problem with the film is that what Herzog finds interesting about the cave is not what I find interesting about it.
Here's what I find interesting:
- The entirety of recorded history could fit between the first of these paintings and the last. There are overlapping figures that were painted 5,000 years apart.
- There are lumps of coal on the floor of the cave from torches that brushed against the cieling there 28,000 years ago.
- There are several paintings of lions. This settled a debate in the scientific community about whether ice age lions had manes. There's no way to tell from the fossil record, but in the painting, you can clearly see that the male lion did not have a mane. This is a tiny little piece of information, it's true. But before the discovery of the caves, this was an unsolvable mystery. It was so long ago, there was just no way to know. Except that there is, and it was solved. And the fact that we can learn anything new about 40,000 years ago is just amazing and greatly appeals to my inner scientist.
- The paintings are immediately identifiable to us. Not just because we have animals similar enough now to what they had then. Because we reduce three dimensional reality into two dimensional figures in fundamentally the same way as the very first humans to ever attempt a two dimensional rendering. That blows my mind. With 5,000 year old Egyptian art, you can make a case for there being a continuity of artistic influence between then and now making it interpretable. But these caves were buried 20,000 years ago. There may be continuity other places, but it seems to me that humans all over the world, throughout history, solved the problem of creating figures to represent the world the same way over and over again. I think that says something profound about our neural architecture.
- They have found a flute from the same time period in Germany. When they made a copy and played it, they discovered it was pentatonic. You can play the "Star-Spangled Banner" on it. That blows my mind.
What I do not find interesting about the caves is what the researchers dreamt after walking through them.
So, if you are at all interested in pre-history or early humans, go see it in 3D. But be prepared to roll your eyes at Herzog's rambly and often irrelevant commentary.
The Chauvet Cave in France contains the oldest paintings known to exist. They are around 35,000 years old. Because of the delicate nature of the caves, and the unimaginable value of them, only a handful of scientists will ever be allowed to enter them. This film is quite possible the only time they will be captured on film. So, since you're not ever going to be able to see them for themselves, this is the closest you'll ever get.
There's about an hour of footage in the movie just panning around the caves, showing the paintings, and the stalactites and stalagmites, and the cave bear skulls, some of which have been completely encased in calcite. It is awe-inspiring.
Unfortunately, the movie is an hour and a half. I suppose it would be boring to just pan slowly around the caves for the whole time, so he intersperses footage of the caves with random crap. Like a brief interlude with a perfumer who wanders around pressing his face to rocks, trying to sniff out other caves.
The problem is Herzog is not actually interested in the science at all. Or, really, the history. He's interested in the woo-woo primitive man connection with the spirit world. He interviews scientists but interrupts them when they talk about science to ask them about their dreams. You will not learn anything about paleolithic man watching this film. You will learn a teeny bit about the ice age. But you will also hear Herzog's completely bizarre ramblings about radioactive alligators.
Yes, for those of you that saw the Colbert interview, there are albino alligators. Twenty miles from the caves is a nuclear power plant. The hot water run-off from the plant, resulting from the cooling system, is used to heat a nearby tropical biodome. Where there are alligators. Some of which are albino. They are not, however, radioactive. Herzog seems to have missed the part where albinism is a naturally occuring mutation, it's just that albino alligators die in the wild. The prey sees them coming. So his rambly bit about alligators taking over Southern France and what will they think of the caves? IDEK. It's an artificial environment, dude. Alligators are not about to break out and crawl a mile into some cave.
Also, he does mention the phonebook thing in the movie, and that, at least, makes sense. He's talking to a scientist who is part of a project that has made a hyper-accurate laser map of the cave system. Herzog's point, in saying that you can look at the Manhattan phonebook and not know if those people cry or dream at night, is that this scientific catologuing of the minutae of the cave is besides the point and tells us nothing about the people who painted there. I disagree with him about the utility of such endeavors, but the analogy at least makes sense.
The fundamental problem with the film is that what Herzog finds interesting about the cave is not what I find interesting about it.
Here's what I find interesting:
- The entirety of recorded history could fit between the first of these paintings and the last. There are overlapping figures that were painted 5,000 years apart.
- There are lumps of coal on the floor of the cave from torches that brushed against the cieling there 28,000 years ago.
- There are several paintings of lions. This settled a debate in the scientific community about whether ice age lions had manes. There's no way to tell from the fossil record, but in the painting, you can clearly see that the male lion did not have a mane. This is a tiny little piece of information, it's true. But before the discovery of the caves, this was an unsolvable mystery. It was so long ago, there was just no way to know. Except that there is, and it was solved. And the fact that we can learn anything new about 40,000 years ago is just amazing and greatly appeals to my inner scientist.
- The paintings are immediately identifiable to us. Not just because we have animals similar enough now to what they had then. Because we reduce three dimensional reality into two dimensional figures in fundamentally the same way as the very first humans to ever attempt a two dimensional rendering. That blows my mind. With 5,000 year old Egyptian art, you can make a case for there being a continuity of artistic influence between then and now making it interpretable. But these caves were buried 20,000 years ago. There may be continuity other places, but it seems to me that humans all over the world, throughout history, solved the problem of creating figures to represent the world the same way over and over again. I think that says something profound about our neural architecture.
- They have found a flute from the same time period in Germany. When they made a copy and played it, they discovered it was pentatonic. You can play the "Star-Spangled Banner" on it. That blows my mind.
What I do not find interesting about the caves is what the researchers dreamt after walking through them.
So, if you are at all interested in pre-history or early humans, go see it in 3D. But be prepared to roll your eyes at Herzog's rambly and often irrelevant commentary.