Before the Fall When They Wrote It on the Wall

We queued up Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) partly because we'd seen another Werner Herzog documentary, and were curious about his style. How much is self-parody, how much is actual weirdness? But we also wanted to see inside the cave.

Herzog got permission to film in the Chauvet Cave along with a scientific team. This cavern contains perhaps the oldest known paintings of animals known. Herzog talks a bit about the discovery of the cave, how it has been sealed for ~20-30,000 years, and a bit about life at the time the paintings were made. He talks to some scientists who discuss some of the sensory impressions the people who made the paintings might have felt. For example, one scientist suggests that the flickering torches might have given an impression of movement, which Herzog likened to prehistoric cinema. He even brings in a retired perfumer, who is trying to find caves by smell. He goes into the cave and can smell - nothing in particular. The cave has no characteristic smell. Ah, but what he can imagine.

And here I don't know if Herzog is serious or just kidding.

Then the camera crew - Herzog, a handheld camera operator and two grips with small portable LED lights, get to go in by themselves. The movie becomes magical here, as they film the aurochs, cave lions, rhinos, and horses in shifting lights. This is the real thing. 

I was amazed to see how sophisticated these drawings were. Not just the stylization of the giant horns on the rhinos, or the feeling of action, but the modeling of the 3D surfaces of the horses. I didn't know shading had been invented 30,000 years ago.

Herzog finishes by visiting a habitat near the cave, heated by the waste heat of a nuclear reactor. They farm alligators there, and some are albinos, mutants, he suggests, due to the radiation. He wonders if, in the far future, would these mutant alligators look upon the cave paintings, and see, as if in a mirror, the reflections of themselves? OK, now I know he's just pulling our legs. Or is he?