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Paintings from the Chauvet cave in France, the oldest ever discovered

The Chauvet cave in France, discovered in 1994, features the world’s earliest known artwork in the form of cave paintings as old as 30,000 years. The paintings are so precious that the French government allows only a small team of scientists access to them.

Werner Herzog is not a scientist.

The German filmmaker got unprecedented access to the cave to document the pristine paintings, some so unchanged by time they look freshly created. Cave of Forgotten Dreams is the resulting documentary, shot over the course of six days during which Herzog and three assistants tried their best to capture the paintings without venturing off a two-foot-wide walkway. It is the closest most people will ever get to the inside of the Chauvet cave.

The paintings themselves are, in a word, beautiful. The collapse of the one-time entrance to the cave means the inside has been almost completely preserved. There are still charcoal fragments from when earlier humans had made their marks on the walls, and the skulls of cave bears and other animals litter the ground. Although there are no human remains, Herzog’s narration brings the ancient people to life.

In the kind of awkward and probing interview typical of Herzog’s documentaries, a circus performer-turned-archaeologist explains that very advanced tools had helped map every square millimetre of the cave, which is about 600 feet deep. This, the archaeologist explained, would help us start to understand what our forebears had been like.

“Did they dream?” Herzog interjects in his flat Bavarian accent. “Did they cry at night?”

Along these lines, Herzog explores what and how these ancient humans must have thought while they drew their designs. The artists used the contours of the cave walls to bring the mammoths, bears and other creatures to life in three dimensions, and they used overlapping designs to give them the appearance of motion.

In one particularly astonishing example, an animal figure shows the claw marks of a cave bear, and another design painted on top of that. The two paintings, however, were created some 5,000 years apart. The cave was clearly an important place — likely for religious rites — and remained so for a long time.

Herzog filmed in 3D, but even in 2D the cave crackles with life and spirituality as he expounds on the dreams our human ancestors might have had while painting on cave walls in southern France in the flickering light of torches. The discussion becomes so ethereal that I actually fell asleep for about 15 minutes of the film, and in my mind was transported to the cave. It was a surreal but entirely fitting way to experience the film, as though I were making a connection with people thousands of years in the past through their art.

The 90-minute film flies by despite mostly consisting of panning shots of the same several walls. The intimate surroundings of the cave create a world in which the profundity of the paintings can truly be appreciated by modern humans 30,000 years later. Herzog isn’t afraid to ask deeply philosophical questions about what makes us human, and he is just as unafraid in answering them.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams is currently playing at the Roxy Theatre.

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image: supplied