CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS *** 1/2 out of ****
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I'm writing this sentence in the year 2011. Now imagine that someone came along in the year 7011 (some five thousand years later) and added this second sentence. Then the two sentences sit there side by side until the year 32,011 when we come along and see those sentences for the first time. That's the span of eons we have to grasp when watching this bewitching film.
It's a documentary by the great and eccentric Werner Herzog -- shot in 3-D no less -- that explores a recently discovered cave in France. Cave Of Forgotten Dreams reveals a space filled with drawings some 25,000 to 32,000 years old that ranks as one of the great cultural and archeological finds of all time. The cave is off limits to absolutely everyone except for rare visits by scientists.
But Herzog being Herzog, he is rightly given some brief hours to document the find. The result is more focused than his recent marvelous documentary Encounters At The End Of The World but it's a marvel nonetheless. And the usage of 3-D is spectacular: you want to reach out and stroke the walls again and again. A hush fell over the crowd watching this film as we absorbed the images: a herd of horses galloping across one wall, the palm print of one visitor appearing over and over at the entrance and at various points throughout the caves like a prehistoric display of tagging, not to mention the sheer beauty of the space itself.
Herzog asks his usual philosophical, probing questions that elicit unexpected remarks from the scientists. But his masterstroke was commissioning the perfect score by Ernst Reijseger, which is angular and haunting, celestial and ancient, religious and earthy all at once. The postscript wanders off to a nearby sanctuary where albino alligators are spawned in the warm waters tossed off by a nuclear reactor and I don't quite get the connection. But Herzog is always looking for those connections or just taking in the world in wide-eyed wonder and he is the perfect tour guide for this rare glimpse at the past. An experience.
*****
Thanks for reading. Michael Giltz is the cohost of Showbiz Sandbox, a weekly pop culture podcast that reveals the industry take on entertainment news of the day and features top journalists and opinion makers as guests. It's available free on iTunes. Visit Michael Giltz at his website and his daily blog. Download his podcast of celebrity interviews and his radio show, also called Popsurfing and also available for free on iTunes. Link to him on Netflix and gain access to thousands of ratings and reviews.
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