One of the joys of being on the MFA is the seemingly never-ending range of sources of inspiration. Regular film screenings are running and I was fortunate to catch ‘Cave of Forgotten Dreams’ (‘Cave’). I had seen other Herzog work a while ago, the documentary series dealing with Death Row, the Enigma of Caspar Hauser and Fitzcarraldo. I hadn’t seen ‘Cave’ before and found it totally compelling. It explores the Chauvet cave in France, site of some of the oldest cave paintings in the world. Access to the caves is severely limited to ensure the preservation of the paintings. It looks like a sacred space and Herzog and his crew do an astonishing job of drawing you into the images.
We see handprints, lions, horses, a mammoth and a bear. They look remarkably contemporary to me. They are immediately recognisable and I wonder about the eyes that saw them and the drive to record them, as the narrator says, ‘we know nothing of who they were as individuals but they have left us their marks.’ This is particularly interesting to me in terms of my own exploration of digital traces and impermanence.
At one point someone talks to an Australian Aboriginal artist who is repainting ancestral murals, when he is asked about what he is painting he replies simply that he is not painting this, the spirit is painting this. The interviewer seems surprised and it highlighted for me the limitations of viewpoint we have if we are not careful.
At the end of the journey through the cave the film moves to a nuclear power station further down the valley from the cave. In a glasshouse where the water is heated by the power station there are crocodiles, they are mutated by the radioactive water and are albino. We move to a moment of post-humanism where Herzog wonders aloud what the crocodiles would think of the paintings if they saw them.
Having not known quite what to expect I left with a whirlwind of ideas and inspiration. There was something about the cocooning nature of the cinematography and the music that made it all absorbing.