So this, I thought, is literature too — as horses, lions and rhinos galloped across the screen, having travelled 300 centuries to reach me. I was sitting in a darkened cinema, 3-D glasses perched on my nose, watching Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams. The film, by an auteur who is surely the world’s most unlikely advocate for the generally hokey 3-D format, is in some ways an altogether unlikely Herzog adventure. From the man who brought you Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre, Wrath of God comes a fairly straight-up-and-down documentary about the art of the Chauvet cave.
Towards the end of 1994 three speleologists were exploring a limestone ridge on some hills by the Ardèche River. They found a narrow passageway leading into what turned out to be a complex of caverns, sealed off from the outside world by a rockfall 26,000 years earlier. But long before that, when the caves were still easily accessible from the outside, there had been other visitors. As the explorers made their way through the passageways, Éliette Brunel, one of the three, caught sight of a drawing of a mammoth made in red ochre on a rocky spur descending from the ceiling. “They were here!” she cried out — and so one of the greatest finds of Upper Paleolithic art was made.
Unlike the caves at Lascaux, access was severely restricted from the beginning to avoid damage to the astonishing work. Herzog was lucky that he could number among his fans the French Minister of Culture, who agreed to allow him, and a very small crew, into the caves during one short season of scientific research. When I say that it’s fairly straight-up-and-down, that is by Herzog’s eccentric standards. You’ll find a scientist dressed up in skins playing The Star Spangled Banner on a bone flute. You’ll find another scientist confessing that he used to be in the circus. You’ll find a pair of modern-day albino alligators. But the real thing that you will find is a willingness on Herzog’s part to admit that the people who left their images on the rock tens of thousands of years ago were no different — no less sophisticated, no less astute, no less intelligent — from the travellers who arrived to capture their work on camera.
It’s disappointing, reading about the film, to find references to the artists as “primitive people”. As primitive as Vermeer or Holbein, I’d say — or as primitive as any of the poets whose work vanished before writing could fix it, for a moment, in time. The artists of the Chauvet cave can’t be lumped together into that vague term, prehistory: you can see the individuality of their work, and in one of the film’s most moving moments you discover that it is possible to follow the path of one single artist, one human, someone like us, as he painted his way through the cave. He was a poet in paint, and his work — miraculously — has crossed an ocean of time to reach us.
We can’t hear the stories told by the people who made the paintings in the Chauvet cave; but their echo survives. Literature can’t simply be pinned into books. We are lucky to have them, and their electronic equivalents too. But some day they may be gone, and all that will survive — if we are very, very lucky and don’t destroy the planet we live on — will be our voices, our stories, told in words, or told in paint, told with memory and breath. That will be enough.
Advertisement
That’s what makes us human.