Articles Cinema Returns to the Source Below Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010)

CINEMA RETURNS
TO THE SOURCE
Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams

By Roger F. Cook Introduction

Keywords: Werner Herzog, Cave
of Forgotten Dreams, moving-
images history, embodied
spectatorship, biology-culture
co-evolution, Palaeolithic art
In December 1994 a trio of French speleologists
discovered the largest and most beautifully formed
cave in the archaeologically rich Ardèche Gorges
region. Named after the lead explorer, Chauvet
Cave contains spectacular paintings that are
the oldest discovered art of its kind. The paint-
ings were created at different times over several
thousand years in the Aurignacian and Gravettian
periods, with the oldest dating back more than

26 | film international issue 61

Articles Cinema Returns to the Source
30,000 years. Somewhere around 20,000 years ago a
rockslide hermetically sealed the cave, preserving
it and its art in pristine condition until the discov-
ery. Because of the cave’s significance and beauty,
the French government acquired full rights to it
and closed it to the public, providing only limited
and strictly controlled access to a small number of
researchers. In 2010 the French Ministry of Culture
granted Werner Herzog exclusive permission to
film the cave, but set severe limits on the project. It
stipulated that the skeletal film crew of a cinema-
tographer, a sound recorder and an assistant had
to carry all the equipment with them, and that
their lights could only emit very low amounts of
heat (Figure 1). They were allowed six shooting
days in the cave and only four hours per day.
Entrusted with the sole opportunity to film this
historical treasure, Herzog produced a feature-
length documentary shot in 3D that offers both
comprehensive archaeological knowledge about
the cave and compelling visual sequences of its
paintings. Cave of Forgotten Dreams is however
much more than simply an expository documen-
tary that introduces Chauvet Cave to a public that
will never be able to visit it. Herzog seized this
opportunity to pursue key questions that have
informed his film-making over the years. At the
end of the first of several sequences that feature
the paintings he asks: ‘These images are memo-
ries of long forgotten dreams. […] Will we ever be
able to understand the vision of the artists across
such an abyss of time?’ He lays out here the cen-
tral question that will guide the film’s explora-
tion of the cave and its paintings. At the end of
the voice-over Herzog cuts from inside the cave to
an aerial shot of Pont d’Arc, the imposing natural
bridge over the Ardèche River that is located near
Chauvet Cave (Figure 2). As the camera moves gen-
Below left Figure 1 Below right Figure 2
tly toward the arch and then down and through it,
Herzog suggests a possible answer:
There is an aura of melodrama in this land-
scape. It could be straight out of a Wagner
opera or a painting of German Romanticists.
Could this be our connection to them? This
staging of a landscape as an operatic event
does not belong to the Romanticists alone.
Stone Age men might have had a similar sense
of inner landscapes and it seems natural that
there is a whole cluster of Palaeolithic caves
right around here.
The notion that an inner vision of landscapes
might provide a link back to the Palaeolithic cave
painters revives a motif that has surfaced in sev-
eral of Herzog’s films (Ames 2009: 50–53; Prager
2007: 11–12). In discussing his attraction to this
motif he has compared himself with the Romantic
painter Caspar David Friedrich, who, he says, also
‘wanted to show and explore inner landscapes’
(Cronin 2002: 136). And yet, even as he specu-
lates that Pont d’Arc may have played a similar
role for Stone Age humans, he concedes that we
will never be able to reconstruct a picture of their
inner lives. Despite all the technological advances
in archaeological research featured in the film, he
admits at one point that we will never know: ‘Do
they dream? Do they cry at night? What are their
hopes? What are their families?’ Nonetheless, as
he works to recreate a version of what the Chauvet
painters were envisioning 30,000 years ago he is
dependent on archaeological research to, as one
of the scientists in the film puts it, ‘create stories
about what could have happened in that cave dur-
ing the past’.
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Articles Cinema Returns to the Source
The archaeological evidence presented in the
film provides Herzog the creative licence not
merely to speculate about the artistic vision
expressed in the paintings, but also to try to evoke
an interaction with them comparable in some
ways with that of the original cave-goers. Archae-
ologists’ accounts of the rituals that likely took
place in the caves suggest that a film-maker may
be able to simulate the purported experience of the
Palaeolithic visitors more effectively than either
the Romantic painter or the architect of the oper-
atic Gesamtkunstwerk. Although what transpired in
the caves will remain to a large degree speculation,
enough is known to indicate a remarkable similar-
ity between the ceremonial activities involving the
paintings and cinema. Herzog utilizes this connec-
tion, while also reflecting on it. Here I first exam-
ine how he fashions Cave of Forgotten Dreams as a
return to the source of cinema and, in doing so,
takes on the role of a cinematic shaman, perform-
ing for his viewers much the same function as the
ceremonial masters of the Palaeolithic might have
done in their time. The focus then turns to the
developments in cultural evolution that enabled
humans to produce art such as the Chauvet paint-
ings. An analysis of how the human capacity for
mental imaging co-evolved with the production
of images in external media provides the basis for
assessing how the cinematic image may fare as a
conduit leading back to the inner vision of the Pal-
aeolithic cave-goer. And finally I explore how the
film’s peculiar Postscript fits into the picture I offer
of Herzog’s look back at the unknown painters he
considers to be his artistic ancestors.
Cinematic simulation of
the cave experience
Despite the span of millennia separating the two
cultures and their technologies, the medium of
sound film and the cultural practices of cinema
have striking similarities with the artistic medium,
setting, and patterns of reception of the cave paint-
ings. Herzog alludes to these correspondences
throughout the film and even foregrounds them
flamboyantly at times. The film also highlights that
the paintings are the earliest known instance of
the dynamic simulation of mental images in an
external medium. As he portrays the cave art in
this way, he frames his filming of Chauvet Cave as
cinema returning to the moment in history that
28 | film international issue 61
prefigures the invention of film. With the techno-
logical and cultural similarities between the cave
paintings and cinema as the backdrop, the film
then probes whether the audience’s involvement
in its cave sequences may form a bridge back to
our ancestors who stood on the threshold to his-
tory 35,000 years ago.
Herzog’s attempt to put his viewer in touch
with the cave-goers of the Upper Palaeolithic
period hinges on archaeological theories about
the purpose of the paintings. It is known that
human ancestors lived in or near cave openings
for many thousands of years before they utilized
the subterranean depths where the paintings were
created (Montelle 2004: 132). These less accessible
areas were not used as dwellings nor were they
frequently visited. The strenuous effort required
to reach them, which Herzog expressly demon-
strates in Cave of Forgotten Dreams, renders them
unsuitable for everyday activities. The halls and
caverns where the Chauvet paintings are located
served more esoteric functions. Although exactly
what kind of ceremonies took place there remains
largely conjecture, archaeological evidence
increasingly suggests that shamanistic rituals were
performed in these areas and that the paintings
were located there for precisely this purpose. Given
the lack of historical record, we will probably never
attain solid proof of this. Still, the broadly framed
hypothesis of this use, as it is formulated here
by Yann-Pierre Montelle, is now widely accepted:
‘throughout the 25,000-year span of the Upper Pal-
aeolithic, the decorated deep caves functioned as
cultural containers where liminal activities were
performed and systematized and esoteric knowl-
edge was archived’ (Montelle 2004: 131).
At various moments in the film Herzog focuses
on correspondences between the situation of the
original cave visitors and the setting in a movie
theatre. When they first enter Chauvet Cave, Jean
Clottes, a prominent archaeologist and former Sci-
entific Advisor for the French Ministry of Culture,
explains that there are no paintings in the first
and largest chamber in the cave, except at the far
end where the light from the original entrance-
way would not have reached. In other words, the
paintings were intentionally placed in the dark.
At another point Herzog asks whether there were
fires in the cave that might have cast shadows on
the paintings (Figure 3). As we see shadows of the
film crew cast onto the cave walls, Jean-Michel
Geneste, the director of the Chauvet Cave Research

Articles Cinema Returns to the Source
Project whom Herzog calls on for crucial explana-
tions and insights throughout the film, explains
that torches were indeed necessary to see the
paintings. In another sequence we hear how the
torches would have created an effect of dynamic
movement in the paintings not unlike that pro-
duced by the moving images of film. In an inter-
view inside the cave a pair of archaeologists call
attention to the dynamic circular movement in the
spectacular Panel of the Horses that contains fight-
ing rhinos, three bulls and four overlapping horses
(Figure 4). Later, when the specialist in Palaeolithic
art Dominique Baffier leads the film crew through
the cave, she shines her flashlight onto a bison, to
explain how its multiple legs convey the impres-
sion that it is running, as if it were following the
aurochs ahead of it on the wall. All of these discus-
sions occur while the play of light and shadows
created by the movement of the crew’s portable
light panels and flashlights simulate the effect of
the original torches and produce a kinetic effect
similar to that of film images.
The similarity to cinema goes beyond the purely
visual aspect of moving images on a wall-like
surface. Baffier describes how you can almost hear
Below top left Figure 3
Below bottom left Figure 4
Below right Figure 5
the clashing of the fighting rhinos and the panting
of the horses in the Panel of the Horses and that
this accentuates the sense of movement inher-
ent in the figures. This synaesthetic generation of
auditory effects through visual elements was most
likely part of an integrated mise-en-scène arranged
for rituals that took place in the cave. Drawing on
models developed through cross-cultural research,
Montelle theorizes that the cave art of the Upper
Palaeolithic was part of a setting designed for the
inclusion of music or other sound effects in cere-
monies involving the paintings. Through an analy-
sis of the caves’ architectonics he shows that the
images are situated to take advantage of particular
acoustic properties that would enhance the ritual’s
physical and psychological effect on the partici-
pants (Montelle 2004: 148–49; Lewis-Williams 2002:
223–27). Using sound-producing objects and musi-
cal instruments, the shamanistic orchestrators of
these ceremonies could generate an image/sound
dyad that anticipates the audiovisual image of
sound film. In his exploration of the cave, Herzog
employs the music of Ernst Reijseger together
with sound effects to reconstruct a modern-day
simulation of the audio elements that were likely
employed in the original rituals.
The most dramatic demonstration of how the
cave ceremonies constituted a ‘proto-cinema’, as
Herzog calls it, follows Geneste’s description of the
role fire played in the paintings. He says that par-
ticipants may have indeed been staged around the
fires so that you can even imagine people dancing
with their shadows. Herzog immediately interjects,
‘Fred Astaire!’, as the film cuts to a clip from the
‘Bojangles of Harlem’ dance number in Swing Time
(1936), in which Fred Astaire is dancing with three
of his shadows enlarged on a screen behind him
(Figure 5).
Geneste says he was also thinking of this scene,
and as the clip plays, he adds: ‘I think that this
image, dancing with his shadow, is a very strong
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Articles Cinema Returns to the Source
and old image of human representation. Because
the first representation was the wall, the white
wall and the black shadow’. Here the correlation
between the two media is drawn even tighter.
The dancing sequence is an obvious metaphor for
cinema, where the film images projected onto a
white screen are shadows cast by the film run-
ning through the projector. The Bojangles scene
also simulates the situation in the cave, where
the shadows of the participants, who were per-
haps dancing to ceremonial music, would have
been cast onto the wall as moving figures. The
scene from Swing Time also constitutes a return to
the ‘cinema of attractions’, as Tom Gunning has
famously termed the early style of feature films
(Gunning 1990: 56–62). Including it in Cave of For-
gotten Dreams stages a move back away from the
cinema of narrative integration to an embodied
engagement in movement and the image as effect
that more closely resemble the dynamic at work
in the cave rituals. Herzog deploys the Bojangles
clip as a classical reworking of early cinema that
also projects what the Palaeolithic cave-goers
must have experienced as they danced and their
shadows danced with them amidst the animals on
the walls.
The film’s title points to one kind of experience
that we might share with them. There is a literal
truth to Herzog’s characterization of the paintings
as ‘memories of long forgotten dreams’. According
to David Lewis-Williams’s account of the liminal
activities that took place in the caves, the iconic
images depicted in the paintings derive from
altered states of consciousness, such as dreams,
hallucinations and trances. He explains that the
pictorial representation of the animals resemble
iconic images that appear during such experi-
ences. The figures often end around the lower part
of the legs, and even when the feet are included,
the animals are not shown in contact with the
ground or any other part of their surround-
ings. They appear rather more like ‘free-floating
mental images’ (Lewis-Williams 2002: 194) of the
kind experienced in hallucinations and dreams.
Researchers have also noted that in hallucino-
genic states iconic mental images often seem as if
they have been projected onto flat surfaces such
as walls or ceilings. Some who have experienced
hallucinations describe the mental imagery as
being ‘like a motion picture or slide show’ (Lewis-
Williams 2002: 192). Dream researchers have noted
a similar effect. In 1946 Bertram Lewin coined the
30 | film international issue 61
expression ‘dream screen’ to describe how dream
images are projected onto a blank background that
is analogous to the motion picture screen (Lewin
1946). It is no surprise then that the film industry,
like the Palaeolithic shamans, chose a setting that
exploits the connection between its moving-image
technology and dreams. The commercial movie
theatre, where the viewer sits quietly in a dark-
ened hall while a stream of visual images are pro-
jected onto a large screen, both simulates the sleep
environment and mirrors the internal setting for
the mental imagery of dreams. Bolstered by these
correspondences, Herzog looks to dream imagery
as the internal medium that can provide access to
the visions captured by the shaman painters of the
Upper Palaeolithic. As the modern form of cultural
expression most closely adapted to our dream
life, cinema is then the fitting external medium for
establishing this link back to the images depicted
on the cave walls.
This suggests that the cinematic image, when
effectively manipulated, might be well-suited for
evoking responses to the Chauvet paintings that
reverberate with those of the original cave-goers.
It also fits well with Herzog’s film-making. He has
said that his films do not present reality, but rather
all his films show in effect ‘the reality of dreams’;
and he declared that the ‘true strength of mov-
ies lies in their ability to work with the reality of
dreams’ (Wetzel 1976: 116–17, emphasis in the
original). With respect to Cave of Forgotten Dreams
we should not take this to mean that he wants to
awaken in the viewer archaic dream images such
as those of the animals seen in the paintings. For
Herzog, ‘working with the reality of dreams’ means
something different than what one might find in
traditional models of spectatorship. It is not, for
example, a matter of placing dream sequences
before the eyes of a spectator to be observed. Nor
does it mean presenting the dream like a text to
be ‘read’ or interpreted. Rather the film viewer is
drawn into the movement and presence of the
image and thus moved to participate in the dream
experience in a more fully embodied way (Cook
2011: 95–98).
To the extent that a film succeeds in doing this
the viewer must rely heavily on visual imagery
from her own individual store of memories. The
young, engaging research assistant, Julien Monney,
who stands out as an exception among the cast of
eminent archaeologists featured in the film, speaks
cogently about the power of the cave to evoke

Articles Cinema Returns to the Source
dream experiences (Figure 6). When Herzog sug-
gests that we will never know about the dreams
of the original cave-goers, Monney explains that
as human beings we all have an individual back-
ground that affects how we experience the cave
in a personal manner. This leads to a humorous
moment when Herzog asks him what his back-
ground is, and he replies that he had been a circus
performer. But what he is saying here is crucial
to the kind of engagement with the paintings
that Herzog wants to elicit. For Monney, piecing
together an archaeological account of what hap-
pened in Chauvet Cave is only one way of mining
what it has to offer. Because it has been preserved
in a pristine state for about 20,000 years, Chauvet
Cave affords those with access an unprecedented
opportunity to interact with an environment cre-
ated by our prehistoric ancestors and to relive in
some way what they must have experienced at the
time. To do so the present-day visitor must draw
on a personal repertoire of mental images shaped
by their own individual past. In the case of Monney
the time he spent in the circus serves as a bridge
back to the Palaeolithic humans in Chauvet Cave.
He explains that after spending his first five days
in the cave he decided that he needed to take a
break and let the strong emotions that had been
awakened settle in. Every night after he had been
in the cave he would dream of lions. In response
to Herzog’s question whether they were real lions
or paintings, he said that they included both – real
lions, like those he had encountered in the circus,
and paintings of lions, like those found in the cave
(Figure 7). In other words, his strong emotional
encounter with the Chauvet setting drew both
from his time in the cave and his background in
the circus. This exchange offers an example of
the kind of impact Herzog hopes his film might
have and serves as a catalyst to generate in the
Below left Figure 6
Below right Figure 7
viewer the mindset needed to approach the film as
more than just an expository documentary about
Chauvet Cave.
To engage the viewer in a simulated version
of the Palaeolithic ceremonies Herzog assumes
the role of a latter-day, cinematic shaman who
attempts to spur comparable physical responses
to the dynamic play of light and shadow in the
cave. His strategy hinges on moving through and
exploring space in a way that evokes physical real-
ity and generates a sense of presence. The goal is
an embodied simulation of participation in the ritu-
als for which the paintings were created. I borrow
the term embodied simulation from the context of
recent research on mirror neurons (Gallese 2005;
Metzinger 2009: 170–83), where it refers more
specifically to how mirror neurons respond to the
movements and gestures of another person and
activate in the observer the same neural systems
that are guiding the other’s actions. In this specific
sense, embodied simulation occurs when one is in
the presence of others. It comes into play in film
viewing as well, most notably when the mirror
neurons of the viewer are activated by the bodily
posture, movements and facial expressions of the
characters on-screen. Herzog does not take this
approach in Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Short of cre-
ating a reenactment of cave rituals based on highly
speculative notions of the music, dress, behaviour
and action involved in them, he has two main
resources at his disposal: the cave setting and the
paintings. And in both regards he employs various
techniques to stimulate such a response.
With respect to the geographical and topograph-
ical setting, he focuses on the internal formation
of the cave and the surrounding landscape where
it is located. The use of 3D technology enables him
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Articles Cinema Returns to the Source
to convey the effects produced by the topographi-
cal features of the cave’s chambers and walls. In
particular, the footage in the cave reveals how the
painters incorporated the protuberances in the
wall formations into the figures to create a three-
dimensional perspective and a feeling of physical
interaction with the animals (Lewis-Williams 2002:
36–38). This occurs perhaps most dramatically in
the filming of the rock formation hanging in the
middle of the last chamber. In the film’s second
encounter with this feature Herzog extends the
camera on a boom to the far side of the formation
to be able to show the entire painting. In doing so,
he not only reveals how the artist used the shape
of the rock to provide a three-dimensional figura-
tion of the lower torso of a woman connected to a
bison’s head with a somewhat human arm, but he
also conveys the sense of female sexuality being
palpably present in the chamber. His narration,
‘the bison seems to embrace the sex of a naked
woman’, implies that in the rituals the participants
may have even danced around this rock, caressing
and embracing it (Figure 8).
Herzog also utilizes the terrain around the cave
to evoke a feeling of presence in the viewer. As the
crew and small team of scientists are first mak-
32 | film international issue 61
Below left Figure 8
Below right Figure 9
ing their way there at the beginning of the film,
the camera cuts to a close-up of their feet tromp-
ing along a muddy path through nearby vineyards.
Filmed with a handheld camera from a subjec-
tive point of view, this shot engages the viewer
in the physical effort required to access the cave.
We then watch the researchers and film-makers
working their way up the switchbacks in the trail
to the cave entrance. As he narrates the story of
the rock slide that closed off the cave, the cam-
era tilts upward in a spiralling motion toward the
cliff where it occurred, and continues to spiral for
two almost complete 360-degree rotations while
pointed skyward (Figure 9). This enacts kinaes-
thetic responses that produce dizziness and let
the spectator participate vicariously in the bodily
effects of ascending the trail. Thus even before the
first scenes inside the cave, the film has triggered
embodied modes of spectatorship and conditioned
the viewer to respond actively to the subtler physi-
cal stimulus of the subsequent cave sequences.
Later, the aerial shot that moves through Pont
d’Arc has a similar effect with respect to the key
landmark of the region that the film aligns with
the ‘inner landscape’ of the cave-goer.
These effects are part of the film’s gradual
build-up to a climactic seven-and-a-half-minute
sequence designed to situate the audience as par-
ticipants in a simulated version of the cave ritual.
The filmic elements that generate participation
in this sequence are introduced earlier in shorter
scenes filmed in the same basic style. They feature
a medium close-up shot moving rhythmically
across the paintings to the accompaniment of the
hymn-like instrumental and chanting vocal music
of Reijseger. Using his film lights to reproduce
the effect of torches enables Herzog to include
shots from different chambers in the cave without
breaking continuity. The intervals of darkness from
the shadows passing over the walls serve to mask
the cuts and make the sequence appear to be one
continuous shot. This generates a sense of being
immersed without interruption in a single spiri-
tual experience.
In one of these earlier sequences Clottes has
everyone stop and be quiet, telling them, ‘We’re
going to listen to the silence in the cave, and per-
haps we can even hear our own heart beat’. After
a few seconds of silent shots panning through
the cave, a simulated heartbeat begins on the
soundtrack, followed by instrumental music,
and then a return to the heartbeat, followed by
Articles Cinema Returns to the Source Below right Figure 10

silence again. Throughout this almost four-minute tapping into the power of images exploited by the
sequence moving shadows simulate the flickering, cave painters and, in doing so, examines how the
changing light from the fires and torches. During Chauvet paintings are evidence of an evolutionary
the final seconds of this sequence Herzog asks in threshold that might also be seen as the source
voice-over: ‘Is this their heartbeat or ours?’ Hear- where cinema originated.
ing the sound of a beating heart is a penetrating
and forceful stimulator of embodied simulation.
When we hear and feel the vibration of another
Media and the image
person’s heart beating it tends to change the in human evolution
rhythm and timing of our own heartbeat so that
the two become synchronized. The sound of a Herzog is not trying to conjure up a set of arche-
disembodied heartbeat on the soundtrack together typal or authentic images that correspond to those
with Herzog’s suggestive question spurs a strong in the minds of Palaeolithic cave-goers. Rather,
sense of co-presence with the early cave-goers. In he pursues strategies designed to enable viewers
the final, even longer continuous sequence in the to access their own internal reservoir of mental
cave there is no voice-over, no people in the shot, images more freely. The search for shots that have
just the camera panning across the walls to the this effect has been a central concern through-
music on the soundtrack as the paintings move in out his film-making (Wahl 2011: 310–11). Looking
and out of the shadows. The sound of the heart- out over the city from the observation booth atop
beat returns, along with a period of silence, late in the Tokyo Tower in Wim Wenders’s film Tokyo-Ga
the sequence, before the music resumes and con- (1985), Herzog bemoans the erosion of the connec-
tinues to the end. With the silence and heartbeat tion between the visual landscape we inhabit and
the sense of co-presence that had been established our inner world (Figure 10):
in the earlier scene also returns and reinforces the
participatory dimension of the sequence. Here everything is so built up, images are
The scenes that elicit physical immersion hardly even possible any more. […] One must
alternate with others that present archaeological dig with a shovel like an archaeologist to
evidence about the cave and its historical con- try and see if you can find anything at all in
text. This approach reflects the awareness that this damaged [beleidigten] landscape. […] We
the viewer can never experience the paintings in absolutely need images that correspond in the
the same manner as Palaeolithic humans. In the most profound way with the state of our civili-
make-up of the modern human the spiritual, the zation and our inner world.
ineffable, or however we might designate that
which is beyond our capacity to know, is always The digging that the film-maker must do to
intertwined with cognitive processes of reasoning uncover such visual moments – here in reference
and knowledge. Our access to such experience is to Wenders’s exploration of the city in Tokyo-Ga –
inextricably linked with a need to understand it
in terms of the historical knowledge that defines
modern culture. In Cave of Forgotten Dreams archae-
ology provides a scientific framework that fulfills
the need to grasp the situation cognitively. The
interviews and guided explorations of the cave
by archaeologists acknowledge the wondrous
mysteries of the paintings and validate our desire
to explore them. And yet the knowledge they pro-
vide can only gesture toward the great gulf that
separates our mode of thought from that of these
ancestors. Still, Herzog’s effort to evoke an embod-
ied simulation of the cave rituals indicates that
he believes that we can share in the experience of
our Palaeolithic ancestors on some level. The fol-
lowing section explores his cinematic strategy for

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 Below top Figure 11
Articles Cinema Returns to the Source Below bottom Figure 12

aims to spur in the viewer a corresponding process conventional visual aid found there introduces
of tapping the visual world within. the online visitor to the paintings via links as you
In Cave of Forgotten Dreams Herzog works to move from one chamber to the next, starting at the
unearth images in the viewer out from underneath entrance and proceeding sequentially through the
another kind of ‘damaged’ landscape. In this case cave to its end (Figure 12). Herzog neither provides
the practices of mainstream cinema threaten to this kind of schematic overview in Cave of Forgot-
block the access to those images that might reso- ten Dreams nor does he construct a comparable
nate most strongly with the cave paintings. As an spatial orientation inside the cave via continuity
audiovisual medium, film would seem well-suited editing. Rather he enlists the new digital technolo-
for evoking the sound/image dyad exploited by gies that have helped archaeologists learn about
the shamans who orchestrated the cave ceremo- the cave and its history to support the operations
nies. However, the dominant mode of cinema that of imaging that are vital to his attempt to create an
employs seamless editing to create a coherent embodied simulation of the cave experience.
narrative world – what Noël Burch (1990) termed
the Institutional Mode of Representation – has
produced a cinematic visuality of limited reach.
Prefabricated and tightly packaged narratives
that leave no room for the free play of the image
dull the gaze of the spectator. In Cave of Forgotten
Dreams Herzog avoids the conventional aesthetics
of mainstream cinema and employs particular film
techniques and strategies to de-automate con-
ventional modes of spectatorship. In the key cave
sequences he uses the film lights both to simulate
the effect of the torches used in the Palaeolithic
ceremonies and to produce an alternative mode of
continuity. The darkness of the simulated shad-
ows cast onto the walls conceals the cut from one
chamber to another more seamlessly than conti-
nuity editing hides the transitions between shots
within the same scene. This alternative mode of
constructing spatial unity avoids the linear move-
ment through time and space that structures nar-
rative cinema and fosters sensory immersion in
the paintings.
Herzog reinforces this non-linear spatial orien-
tation by showing a computer graphic model of
the cave’s topology (Figure 11) rather than a more
conventional diagram of its layout. As the eye of
the camera moves through the model produced by
points on a 3D graph, he explains in voice-over:

What we are seeing here is a part of millions
of spatial points. Today scientists have mapped
every singular millimeter of the cave using
laser scanners. The position of every feature
in the cave is known. […] This map is the basis
for all scientific projects being done here.
He chooses this digital pattern over the explana-
tory model that appears on the French govern-
ment’s website for Chauvet Cave. The more
At certain key points he enlists the interviews
with archaeologists to support the idea that film
has the ability to spur new modes of imaging in
the viewer, just as the Chauvet paintings had likely
had a similar effect on Palaeolithic cave-goers. In
the final words of the film before the Postscript
Geneste declares that the invention of figuration
introduced a form of communication that was
better than language, and that it still carries those
advantages today:

34 | film international issue 61


Articles Cinema Returns to the Source
with the invention of the figuration of ani-
mals, man, things, it is a way of communica-
tion between humans and with the future
to evocate the past, to transmit information,
that is very better than language, than oral
communication, and this invention is still the
same in our world today, with this camera, for
example.
Geneste’s reference to Herzog’s camera at the end
of this statement provides a strong endorsement
for the film’s attempt to convey the cave experi-
ence. There is also good reason to be suspicious
about the way the exchange is presented. Herzog
has openly admitted that at times he prompts
interviewees in his documentaries, in some cases
even scripting their responses. Some scenes with
archaeologists in Cave of Forgotten Dreams seem to
be at least partially staged. In particular, Geneste
demonstrating how spears were thrown dur-
ing the Auragnacian period (Figure 13) and the
archaeologist dressed in reindeer fur playing ‘The
Star-Spangled Banner’ on an ice age flute come to
mind (Figure 14). Geneste’s mention of the camera
arouses suspicion for two reasons. First, it ends the
expository arc of the film on a note that supports
Herzog’s use of the cinematic image to elicit deep
forms of experience that are outside the reach of
language. And second, it underscores the notion
that in Cave of Forgotten Dreams the film-maker is
visiting and reflecting on the source of cinema.
Below right Figure 13
Below left Figure 14
Regardless of whether Herzog prompted this
reference to the camera, Geneste’s description of
the paintings’ place in the evolution of human cul-
ture points to a more intrinsic connection between
the cave experience and cinema. Along with carv-
ings in mobiliary art, these paintings from the
beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic are the earli-
est evidence of humans fixing internal pictorial
images in an external medium (Deacon 1997: 374).
These first instances of what contemporary culture
would define as art appeared at an all-important
threshold in the development of human commu-
nication. Archaeologists contend that the shaman
cave painters were not actually inventing images,
rather they were grasping and fixing in the exter-
nal world mental images that already existed and
had been shared socially via the spoken language
(Leroi-Gourhan 1993 [1964]: 195–96; Lewis-Williams
2002: 189–96). The cultural practice of representing
these images graphically in an external medium
constitutes a substantial advance in the way
memories are shared socially and then also pre-
served permanently rather than only in a fleeting
oral context.
The ability to fix and transcribe internal images
onto external media generated a qualitatively new
deployment of what Bernard Stiegler (1998: 152–53)
has termed prosthetic memory. Stiegler draws exten-
sively on André Leroi-Gourhan’s close linking of
the biological evolution of the human to the devel-
opment of technical competence. He does so to
explain how human memory became transformed
by the exteriorization of neurological memory. As
the genus Homo evolved over two million years
through the Middle Palaeolithic period the tool
itself was a prosthetic reservoir for the memory
of the motor actions needed to replicate it. During
this long phase of evolution leading to Homo sapi-
ens mental imaging was limited for the most part
to technical motor function (Leroi-Ghouran 1993
[1964]: 106–07). The accelerated expansion of this
www.filmint.nu | 35
Articles Cinema Returns to the Source
capacity during the Upper Palaeolithic Transition
(45,000–35,000 bc) severed the technical from the
anatomical in one key aspect and distinguished
Homo sapiens from other Homo subspecies that
did not survive. Lewis-Williams argues that in the
case of Neanderthals ‘mental imagery was closely
related to motor skills. […] Physical action acti-
vated mental imagery and, to a lesser extent, vice
versa. The more complex Upper Palaeolithic mental
imagery could be independently entertained and
subtly manipulated’ (2002: 93). According to Leroi-
Gourhan, the enhanced ability to arrest and deploy
mental imagery led to a ‘reflective intelligence
which not only grasps the relationship between
different phenomena but is capable of externaliz-
ing a symbolic representation of that relationship’
(1993 [1964]: 107). Following this reasoning, the
Chauvet paintings are the first definitive evidence
of the progression from ‘technical consciousness’
to intelligence enabled by the increased powers
of mental imaging (Leroi-Gourhan 1993 [1964]:
104–08, 190–96). With the ability to fix and inscribe
prosthetic extensions of images onto external
media (what Geneste calls ‘the invention of figura-
tion’) human cultural evolution makes a quantum
leap forward. The slow synchronous development
of tool culture in conjunction with the expansion
and organization of the frontal cortex gives way to
a co-evolution of the human with ever-increasingly
rapid advances in technology (Leroi-Gourhan 1993
[1964]: 136–39; Stiegler 1998: 145–50). This break-
through brought with it a corresponding accelera-
tion in humans’ ability to shape the environment
and in turn be shaped by the altered environment
(Wexler 2010).
At times Herzog’s filming of the paintings in
Cave of Forgotten Dreams seems to fly in the face of
this cultural evolutionary process that began in the
Upper Palaeolithic period. His mission of ‘unearth-
ing’ vibrant images in his viewers through the
immersive film sequences in the cave reflects on
one hand a romantic disposition that permeates
his film-making. His films often display a strong
distrust of modernity with its accelerated prolif-
eration of changes to the material world and their
influence on our ‘inner landscapes’. This discon-
tent fuels a nostalgia for simpler, past epochs that
puts him in the tradition of German Romanticism.
Although he has adamantly denied a direct influ-
ence (Cronin 2002: 135–36), at times he openly
exhibits an aesthetic vision associated with the
romantic artist. In Cave of Forgotten Dreams he fore-
grounds it in the key passage where he aligns the
36 | film international issue 61
film’s exploration of the Chauvet paintings with
an appreciation of German Romantic painting and
Wagner’s operas. Following a familiar pattern in
his work (Cook 2012a; Cook 2012b), he sets out to
explore the subject of his documentary under the
influence of romantic tendencies, only to have
them rebuffed in the course of the film. Here it is
the desire ‘to understand the vision of the artists
across such an abyss of time’ that fuels his fasci-
nation with the Chauvet paintings. There are small
signs along the way that this is doomed to failure.
Of all the interviews, the one with the circus per-
former turned archaeological researcher implies
most strongly that the viewer can share in some
ways in the experience of the original cave-goers.
And yet when he describes how he needed to take
a break from his work in the cave, Monney relates
that what he had experienced were ‘powerful, deep
things for which there is no direct way of under-
standing them’. This also warns against the naive
notion that the contemporary visitor can interact
with the paintings in the same way as Palaeoli-
thic humans or that the film viewer can somehow
commune with these early ancestors.
In Cave of Forgotten Dreams Herzog does not
address his romantic impulses head-on until the
film leaves the cave and its paintings behind.
When the film-maker turns to look back at the
idealistic view of the paintings with which he
embarked on the project, he does so in the context
of the human cultural evolution that began with
their appearance. With its focus on advances in
the internal process of mental imaging the film
does not address the other side of the evolutionary
phase that erupted during the Upper Palaeolithic.
Or, at least, it does not until the Postscript. When
he does turn to the co-evolution of Homo sapiens
with its environment, he does so in a manner that
has left many viewers baffled and frustrated, and
at best willing to indulge Herzog his closing flight
of fancy as reward for an otherwise informative
and moving film.1 The Postscript deserves, I think,
to be taken more seriously.
Postscript
In Cave of Forgotten Dreams Herzog ends the docu-
mentary with an addendum expressly labelled as
a postscript. He does this to mark an abrupt shift
away from the film’s effort to involve the viewer
in an embodied simulation of the cave experience.
After spending much of the film attempting to let
the paintings work their magic on the viewer, in
Articles Cinema Returns to the Source
the Postscript he offers a critical perspective on the
way he has presented them. The film takes a sud-
den turn from the, for the most part, serious pre-
sentation of archaeological knowledge about the
Palaeolithic period and Chauvet Cave, to a bizarre
scene with albino crocodiles and the prospect that
they might reach the cave and contemplate the
paintings. This final episode is not directed only at
the romantic penchant, including Herzog’s own,
for idealizing pre-modern facets of human culture.
It also offers a critical perspective on the evolu-
tionary breakthrough of the Upper Palaeolithic
period that made the cave paintings possible.
The film provides the context for understand-
ing the Postscript in the same manner that it had
prepared the viewer for the interactive episodes
in the cave. When the final, long sequence of the
paintings ends, the film cuts to a final interview
just before the Postscript:
Herzog: Do you believe the paintings in the
Chauvet Cave were somehow the beginning
of the modern human soul? What constitutes
humanness?
Geneste: Humanness is a very good adaptation
in the world. So man’s society needs to adapt
to the landscape, to all the beings, the animals,
to the human groups. And to communicate
something, to communicate and to inscribe
the memory on very specific and art things,
like walls, like pieces of wood, like bones, this
is the invention of Cro-Magnon …
Herzog: And how about music?
Geneste: Yes, all those things, mythology,
music, but with the invention of the figuration
of animals, man, things, it is a way of commu-
nication between humans and with the future
to evocate the past, to transmit information, …
The first question Herzog asks (about the human
soul) gestures toward the romantic notion of
the transcendence of the human being from its
physical and cultural evolution. He is seeking here
confirmation for an idea he had proposed earlier in
the film. As the camera panned across the Ardèche
River valley from a cliff high above it, Herzog
reflected on the beginning of human art: ‘What
the people who lived in this valley left behind is
their great art. It was not a primitive beginning or
a slow evolution, it rather burst onto the scene like
a sudden explosive event. It is as if the modern
human soul had awakened here’. He then adds
a second question that lacks this transcendental
Below right Figure 15
aspect. As we might expect from an archaeologist,
Geneste ignores the first and responds directly to
the second (Figure 15). When Herzog interrupts his
response and interjects a question (about music)
designed to move the conversation back toward
the romantic impulses inherent in his first ques-
tion, he sweeps it aside as well and continues to
explain, with the objectivity of a scientist, what
humaneness is.
His response gives Herzog what he has fre-
quently sought in his films – an Olympian point of
view that can extract itself from time and subjec-
tive concerns and look down on humanity with
a timeless objectivity. He has typically employed
human flight, including space journeys, and even
the fictional perspective of aliens in his own ver-
sion of science fiction to achieve this perspective
(Prager 2007: 118–19). In Cave of Forgotten Dreams
archaeology provides him with a scientific ver-
sion of it that is every bit as eye-popping as the
futuristic visions of the alien invader played by
Brad Dourif in The Wild Blue Yonder (2005). From the
perspective of archaeology, which views human
development over many millennia, Geneste gives
a simple and direct answer: ‘Humanness is a very
good adaptation in the world.’ Although all species
interact with their immediate environment, adapt-
ing themselves to it and changing it in some small
ways as they do, what separates humans from all
others is the sweeping and lasting changes that
have resulted from our adaptation to the world
around us.
Geneste’s one-sentence answer sets the stage for
the film’s final perspective on the significance of
the cave paintings for human history. But instead
of turning to archaeology for further explanation,
Herzog turns to the kind of quirky musings for
which he has been criticized by some and champi-
oned by others. He cuts to a shot of a large nuclear
power plant on the Rhone River, some twenty
miles from Chauvet Cave (Figure 16). And as he
www.filmint.nu | 37

Articles Cinema Returns to the Source
then cuts to show the tropical ecosystem that has
been created by the waters used to cool the reac-
tors, his voice-over begins to tell the story of the
crocodiles that live and thrive in this man-made
environment (Figure 17). For the final sequence of
the film his focus shifts to its strangest inhabit-
ants: ‘Not surprisingly, mutant albinos swim and
breed in these waters.’ His voice-over verges on the
Herzogian absurd, even supposing that ‘very soon
these albinos might reach Chauvet Cave’. Most
reviewers have accepted his account of the mutant
crocodiles at face value. Although the ecosystem
with crocodiles living in the warm waters from
the power plant exists, the ‘mutant crocodiles’ are
in fact pale-skinned, yellow-eyed alligators from
Louisiana that he filmed in an aquarium else-
where. Herzog has admitted this at times (Ehrlich
2010) and continued the fictional ruse of mutation
caused by the water from the nuclear plant at oth-
ers (Wigley 2011).
Nonetheless, when viewed from an archaeologi-
cal perspective that includes all of human history,
this seemingly frivolous hypothetical is not as far-
fetched as one might at first think. Only a few hun-
dred years ago the idea that there would be today
38 | film international issue 61
Below left top Figure 16
Below left bottom Figure 17
Below left bottom Figure 18
an ecosystem with crocodiles on the Rhone River
might have seemed even more incredible.
The final shots and accompanying voice-over
of the Postscript become even more fanciful and
obscure. As the camera looks on from the side
at water level, we see two ‘albino crocodiles’
approach each other head-on and stop with the
tips of their snouts touching (Figure 18). Then one
of the crocodiles disengages from the other, turns,
and swims toward the camera, so that the viewer
is put in the position of the albino crocodile look-
ing into the eyes of its fellow mutant (Figure 19). As
this happens, Herzog conjectures:
It is hard to decide whether or not these crea-
tures here are dividing into their own doppel-
gängers. And do they really meet, or is it just
their own imaginary mirror reflection? Are we
today possibly the crocodiles who look back
into an abyss of time when we see the paint-
ings of Chauvet Cave?
The notion that these crocodiles are dividing
into their own doppelgängers seems at first little
more than poetic play with a well-travelled Ger-
man motif. But the cinematography in this final
scene reveals who has actually found its doppel-
gänger in the form of these albino crocodiles. The
film’s ending places humankind as the mutant
creature looking back from this end of the human
cultural evolution at our prehistoric ancestors who
started it all. We imagine that we are looking back
and making contact with genial creators of a pris-
tine form of figuration that mirrors, and in doing
so also substantiates, our own greatest achieve-
ments in art. The scene in the tropical ecosystem
implies that this idea is a product of our impaired
imagination. The final shot looking into the eyes of
an albino crocodile shows us the actual image that
we should see in the mirror when we look back
and idealize Palaeolithic cave painters. Just as the
ironic undermining of the romantic drive toward
Articles Cinema Returns to the Source
transcendence in Herzog’s films is directed at the
film-maker who undertook the quest for it, it is he
himself behind the camera who is looking into the
eyes of the albino crocodile and imaging it to be
the glorious Palaeolithic predecessor of the artist,
or his own doppelgänger.
But beyond this playfully constructed self-cri-
tique, there is also a less obvious critical take on
the Palaeolithic progenitors of modern humanity
who frequented Chauvet Cave. It does not pertain
to the paintings they created or the cave ceremo-
nies per se. Rather it reflects on the role these early
practitioners of a vibrant Aurignacian culture had
in the transition to a new form of human cultural
evolution. Geneste’s definition of humanness
gets to the crux of the matter. When he says it is
‘a very good adaptation in the world’, this is not
simply a comparative assessment in relation to
other species. Gradually over many thousands of
years human evolution changed from a predomi-
nantly biological process determined by natural
selection and genetic drift, to a cultural process in
which changes humans made in the environment
became the determinant factor in the evolution of
the species.
The cave paintings are early evidence of the
threshold where biological change gave way to
the social group as the driving force of evolution.
The transition from Middle to Upper Palaeolithic
culture triggered an explosion of technical inno-
vation along with significant advances in mental
capacity and social complexity. In this new phase
of evolution, socially-generated activity produces
changes in brain processing that yield faster
advances in technology. The altered environment
then reinforces the newly established network of
neural activity and further develops humankind’s
adaptive ability to survive by changing the world
around it (Wexler 2010). In the case of cave paint-
ings, the ability to hold and fix mental images and
then to reproduce them on cave walls as prosthetic
Below left Figure 19
memories represents a qualitatively new stage in
this dynamic of human cultural evolution. By cre-
ating the first images set in an external medium,
the cave painters produced dramatic new changes
in the environment whose influence on human
evolution directly reinforced and advanced the
mental functions underlying the imaging process.
That is, they served to strengthen imagination and
creativity, and not just technical propensity.2
The paintings were a step forward not only in
the co-evolution of the human with the environ-
ment, but also in the dominance of the cogni-
tive brain functions that enable this co-evolution.
Regarded in this context, the ceremonies con-
ducted in Chauvet Cave may be seen as the
inaugural celebration of humankind’s emerg-
ing cognitive powers that enable it to change the
world, literally creating or reproducing it in its own
image.
For his Postscript Herzog selects the most
extreme example of how far the co-evolution of
humans with the environment has progressed – a
large nuclear power complex in a modern indus-
trial nation that is largely dependent on nuclear
energy. The tropical environment created by the
warm waters from the power plant offer the per-
fect microcosmic metaphor for this evolution of
the human. Its location – only twenty miles from
the cave where we have the best-preserved evi-
dence of the origins of this evolutionary process –
enables Herzog to draw the connection in dramatic
fashion. In the end he situates his audience as the
albino crocodiles who have made their way to look
at the paintings and asks, ‘what will they make of
them?’ He leaves the answer of course open, let-
ting the final shot of the mutant crocodiles and the
suggestive voice-over stand for themselves. And
yet they do seem to imply a response.
It is perhaps fitting here to give the final word to
an archaeologist who provides an answer that mir-
rors Herzog’s own penchant for ironic twists. In The
Symbolic Species Terence Deacon (1997) conjectures
how the effectiveness of new tools, along with
other factors, may have created the new demo-
graphic and ecological situation that enabled the
emergence of portable and parietal art during the
Upper Palaeolithic. He explains that the techni-
cal advances that improved the ability to hunt
also depleted the resources they were designed to
exploit. This ushered in a spiralling progression
of technological innovation that was needed to
meet the new challenges of the altered environ-
www.filmint.nu | 39
Articles Cinema Returns to the Source
ment. ‘This is a view of “progress” that is not so
much improvement as irreversibility, […] probably
many of the events we view as advances, from our
hindsight perspective, were desperate responses
to the environmental degradation that human
foraging success itself brought on’ (Deacon 1997:
374–75). This account of the transition to the Upper
Palaeolithic also invites an alternative view of the
sustainable way of life enjoyed by humans prior to
it. ‘That we consider this self-undermining process
advancement, and refer to the stable, success-
ful, and until just recently, sustainable foraging
adaptation of Homo erectus as “stagnation”, may be
the final irony to be played out by future evolution’
(Deacon 1997: 375). This captures precisely the
ironic awareness behind the Postscript’s look back
at the film’s romantic view of our early ancestors.
Deacon’s critical reassessment of ‘progress’ also
implicates the first expressions of the symbolic
process acquired by humans, the Chauvet Cave
paintings. And if we impart the capacity for critical
analysis to those fictional albino crocodiles who
might make their way to the cave, then we should
not expect that they would look on the paintings
with ecstatic feelings like those generated by Her-
zog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams.
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Rayns, T. (2011), ‘Cave of Forgotten Dreams: irrelevant postscript (padding?) showing some
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2 The neuroscientists Antonio and Hannah
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Contributor’s details

Roger F. Cook is Professor of German Studies

and Director of the Film Studies Program at
the University of Missouri. He co-edited The
Cinema of Wim Wenders: Image, Narrative, and the
Postmodern Condition (Wayne State University
Press, 1996) and has written extensively on
New German Cinema and contemporary Ger-
man film, with a current focus on the Berlin
School. His work engages research in neurosci-
ence and media theory to investigate issues of
embodiment and affect in film viewing.

(Endnotes)

1 I base this on discussions I had with German

film scholars at the German Studies
Association conference in September 2011 and
the prevailing opinion among reviewers of the
film. For two examples of how this view is
expressed in reviews: ‘The film ends with an

www.filmint.nu | 41
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