German director Werner Herzog shot a documentary in Antarctica ( Encounters at the End of the World) and, for Fitzcarraldo, insisted that his cast and crew transport a ship over a mountain. This is not a director deterred by obstacles.
It made sense that Herzog would be the one to talk his way into the Chauvet Cave in southern France. Named after Jean-Marie Chauvet, who discovered it with his team in 1994, the porous limestone cave holds perfectly preserved drawings from the Paleolithic era, painted approximately 32,000 years ago and protected by a rockslide 20,000 years ago.
France, which has seen other cave paintings damaged by the humid presence of visitors, closed the Chauvet to all but a few art historians, paleontologists and geologists, who must stick to a narrow metal walkway. But Herzog persuaded the custodians to allow him and his colleagues inside for short bursts of time to record the works. Here there are records of long-extinct animals: mammoths, cave bears, woolly rhinos. The drawing of a cave lion even answered the long-standing question of whether the male cave lion had a mane. He didn't.
Herzog shot the resulting film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, in 3-D to capture the painters' use of the contours of the walls. The obvious question is whether the majesty of the 3-D version translates to a 2-D DVD, part of Kinosmith's Hot Docs Collection. There are two answers. No, there isn't the same immersive effect. And yes, the awe remains.
How could it not? These are fully realized works created by early humans who were still sharing the land with Neanderthals and who felt compelled to decorate the walls, by torchlight, with artistic interpretations of the creatures around them. One horse recalls the work of Marc Chagall. A rhinoceros might have been sketched by Ronald Searle.
Cave of Forgotten Dreams works best when the music subsides, Herzog interrupts his English narration and the camera pans slowly across the walls. At other times, the director grows whimsical. He digresses. He interviews a perfume designer whose hobby is detecting hidden caves by sense of smell. An epilogue about albino alligators born in water heated by nuclear power plants is, shall we say, elliptical.
But that's the thing about DVDs. You can skip back to the only known Paleolithic cave painting of a panther, or observe the scratches left by a cave bear over the drawing of a mammoth. Critics, even then.