Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams: the real art underground ...

Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams: the real art underground
Once he put his actors through hell, but now the German master Werner Herzog has travelled back in time for what might be his most moving film
Simon McBurney
Thu 17 Mar 2011 19.00 EDT
On 13 December 1994, on a cliff face in the Ardèche gorge in the south of France, three speleologists first felt a slight draught of air coming from the rocks. They pulled them away and crawled into a space barely wide enough for the human body. Descending a steep shaft, they found themselves in a vast underground cavern of astonishing beauty.
But nothing prepared them for what they saw next. As they advanced into the 400m-long chamber, one of the three, Eliade Brunel, suddenly let out a cry. She said later: "Our light flashed on to a mammoth, then a bear, then a lion with a semi-circle of dots which seemed to emerge from its muzzle like drops of blood, a rhinoceros … We saw human hands, both positive and negative impressions. And a frieze of other animals 30ft long."
Haunted since the day its discovery was projected all over the world in 1994, I, like many others, have always wanted to see inside the Chauvet cave, site of the world's earliest known cave art. Quite rightly, we will never go. It is closed to the public.
Cut to 1976, standing on a cliff at the end of the day on the windswept southern coast of Jersey where the water stretched all the way to St Malo. My father flings out his arm. He tells me that, during the last ice age, this sea was a plain – a savannah-type landscape, albeit a cold one – that stretched from England to France. We were there because he was a prehistorian, and every year of my childhood and adolescence through the 1960s and 70s, we spent weeks on an excavation of a Neanderthal site dating from 120,000 years ago. Across this landscape, he said, roamed bison, mammoth, rhinoceros, lions, horses, deer, bears and countless other species, including the aurochs – giant oxen 2m tall. (The last recorded aurochs only died in 1627 in the Jaktorów Forest in Poland.) You would, my father told me, be looking over a landscape teeming with animals. It was man who was in the minority. It was an animal world.
Maybe it was on these excavations, surrounded by hair-growing, non-washing, chain-smoking 1970s students that I also first heard of Werner Herzog, the radical German film-maker. His evocation of Lope de Aguirre – the 16th-century conquistador terrifyingly incarnated by Klaus Kinski in Aguirre, Wrath of God – drew me, aged 16, into his world. I have followed his films ever since. Here, the borders of fiction and documentary are constantly blurred in an excavation of human excess, endurance and ingenuity. They also have an eccentric, wry humour. Like Herzog himself. I have watched him on YouTube eat his shoe and be shot at while being interviewed. His stubborn, unflinching vision leads him into places most of us will never go. "The poet must not avert his eyes," he once said. "You must look directly at what is around you, even the ugly and … the decadent."
And now, somehow, he has talked his way into filming inside the Chauvet cave. In 3D. With the result that we are able to penetrate where we can never go. With rough humour and touching observations, he guides us; not as an expert, but as we ourselves might look. The result is astonishingly moving.
Herzog leads us into the cave, and we go with him. As the cinema usher said to me on the way out: "This is the first time 3D has made sense to me. It always seemed a gimmick before." She is right. We feel the texture of the rock. Stalagmites and stalactites loom out of the darkness and pass us as we crawl along, their wet shape and colour reminding us of the human body. When we stand, we are in that immense chamber. We are really there. This is not an effect. It is an event. We are in a sacred place. And we feel it.
Jean Clottes, one of the first to authenticate the paintings in 1994, instructs us. "The original entrance was there, and here it was light. As you will see, there are no paintings. They were not painted in the light. They were painted in the dark."
We go further into the dark. Traces are engraved in soft clay. You can almost touch them. A bear has scratched with his claws. Then the next marks are human. Drawn with a stick. And over all this, a finger, tracing the outline of a horse. Every movement of the finger – the speed, the hesitation, the deliberation – is there to see in the single ridged line in the clay. It is astonishing. The horse is really alive. As John Berger wrote in the Guardian in 2002: "Art, it would seem, is born like a foal that can walk straight away … The talent to make art accompanies the need for that art; they arrive together."
Deeper still. And closer. Hands appear dipped in red ochre and planted on the rock. One of the artists had a deformed finger. From the angle that he applied his painted hand to the wall, we even know he was at least 6ft tall.
My father's hands were also deformed, and he too was 6ft tall. He died in 1979. I look in his stead.
The camera swings round. Herzog is sweating. A bead runs down his face. On the floor is a bear skull, next to it a boy's footprint. But this cave belonged to the bears before the humans came, and was returned to them after humans' temporary visit. And the drawings of the animals tell us that: this is the animals' place. But even when evoking their ferociousness, these drawings are not about danger, but familiarity. There is an intimacy with the animals. And an intimacy with the rock. The shoulder of a bison is made rounded by a bulge of limestone. A lion's pelvis follows a convex curve in the rock. Everything is preserved by the thinnest layer of calcite from the water oozing out of limestone over the millennia. Even charcoal pieces that dropped from the artists' hands on to the cave floor are here; still in the place where they fell, 32,000 years ago.
Jean Clottes turns to the film-makers. "Silence please. Please listen to the cave. You may even be able to hear your heartbeat." The visitors stand in silence and awe. (Herzog, perhaps not forgetting the audience in his adopted country, the US, adds music and a heartbeat, but even this does not entirely remove the wonder.) In the cinema, we too hold our breath.
We cut to Julian Monay – a young French archaeologist who startles us with the words: "I am a scientist but also a human being." He confesses he was a circus performer before he became a prehistorian. Working with lions, asks Herzog. No, no, a juggler and unicyclist, Monay replies, before describing, in most unscientific terms, not his line of research but his dreams after his first visit to the cave. I am struck by a tinge of regret in his voice. As if in recognition of something missing for him when he woke. The animals, perhaps?
The endless investigations of the scientists unfold in a delightfully haphazard fashion. An experimental archaeologist, dressed in caribou skins, demonstrates a bone flute, similar to one found in southern Germany of the same antiquity as Chauvet. Ludicrously he plays The Stars and Stripes. Another inexpertly demonstrates a spear throw. A retired "perfumier" suddenly appears. He sniffs the ground, telling us that he is searching for more possible caves with his nose.
Back in the cave, we stand before the great panel of horses. Their muzzles are soft. You can feel the velvet lips. They're not being chased. Unlike the drawings in Lascaux and Altimira 15,000 years later, there are no depictions of hunting anywhere. The legs are doubled and trebled, making them move. "Like proto-cinema," Herzog mutters. And he reinforces what we already know. This is no gallery. This is a place where the animals are alive.
Why have these artists not drawn themselves? There is only a single human figure in the cave: a woman's pudenda and legs. With a bison head overlooking and entwined with her. Are the legs hers or the bison's? There is no separation. The people are in the animals. And the animals are so alive. We can even, it is suggested, hear the sound of a horse's neigh from its open mouth. This horse is neither a symbol, nor a stylisation. It is depicted as we would see a horse now. Here. Today. The observation and imagination of these artists were the same as ours. We feel closer to the drawings on the walls of Chauvet than the painting of, say, an Egyptian mural. These artists are not remote ancestors; they are brothers. They saw like us, they drew like us; we wear essentially the same clothes against the cold.
But despite their proximity, there is something fundamental that cuts us off from them. The time they lived in connected everything. They lived in an enormous present, which also contained past and future. A present in which nature was not only contiguous with them, but continuous. They flowed in and out of a continuum of everything around them; just as the animals flow into and out of the rock. And if the rock was alive, so were the animals. Everything was alive. And perhaps this is what truly separates us: not the space of time, but the sense of time. In our minute splicing of our lives into milliseconds, we live separated from everything that surrounds us. Do you know who made your clothes, or even what they are made of? "We are locked in history; they were not," says Herzog.
And then he wilfully changes direction, suddenly filming crocodiles living in a glasshouse heated by the nuclear power station a few miles downriver from the Chauvet cave. The radioactivity of the water has caused a mutation in the offspring of the crocodiles. They are albino. We leave with this startling image of our deforming modernity, and blink our way into the light.
As we leave the cinema, I remember that on my father's study wall was a section marking the stratigraphy of earth in a trench he dug in a cave in Wales. "Look, time is vertical," he would say, pointing to the strata of clay and loess. We live in horizontal time. In the 1650s, just after the death of the last aurochs in the forest in Poland, Blaise Pascale observed in his Pensées: "We never keep to the present. We anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we wander about in times that are not ours and blindly flee the only one that is. The fact is that the present usually hurts."