Oh James Cameron what have you wrought? First you make Martin Scorsese go 3D (“The Invention Of Hugo Cabret”) and then a few months later more auteurs fall in line for stereoscopic photography. Of course Roger Ebert wrote an essay titled, “Why I Hate 3D (And You Should Too),” and said his distaste for the medium could be reconciled if someone like Scorsese or Werner Herzog made something inventive with the technique and of course just months earlier the German filmmaker had quietly announced he was working on a 3D documentary about caves.
Is Werner going to change Ebert’s mind, or any of ours for that matter, about 3D? Remains to be seen, but because Herzog seems to work lightning fast these days, bulky cameras or not, the 3D doc, “Cave Of Forgotten Dreams” is complete and will premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival this September. Here’s some first look images from the doc as well as the TIFF synopsis below.
Werner Herzog is a wizard at conjuring unforgettable visions, from the ship dragged over the mountain in Fitzcarraldo to the Antarctic landscape in Encounters at the End of the World. Now he brings us the earliest known visions of mankind: the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc cave art of southern France, created more than thirty thousand years ago. By comparison, the famous cave art of Lascaux is roughly half as old. Since Chauvet’s discovery in 1994, access has been extremely restricted due to concerns that overexposure, even to human breath, could damage the priceless drawings. Only a small number of researchers have ever seen the art in person. Herzog gained extraordinary permission to film the caves using lights that emit no heat. But Herzog being Herzog, this is no simple act of documentation. He initially resisted shooting in 3D, then embraced the process, and now it’s hard to imagine the film any other way. Just as Lascaux left Picasso in awe, the works at Chauvet are breathtaking in their artistry. The 3D format proves essential in communicating the contoured surfaces on which the charcoal figures are drawn. Beyond the walls, Herzog uses 3D to render the cave’s stalagmites like a crystal cathedral and to capture stunning aerial shots of the nearby Pont-d’Arc natural bridge. His probing questions for the cave specialists also plunge deep; for instance: “What constitutes humanness?”
The film has no distribution yet, but as the first prominent 3D documentary that we can think of offhand, we’re sure that will change during the festival. However, it will be interesting to see where it lands. Herzog films generally are acquired by specialty divisions studios and end up playing at smaller arthouses (like Film Forum in New York that played his last documentary, “Encounters at the End of the World”). Those film houses are not exactly fully equipped to display 3D in all its glory. Or at least not up to James Cameron’s meticulous standards. We’ll see.
