Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Cave of Forgotten Dreams is a film by Werner Herzog that documents the world’s oldest cave-paintings, found in France in 1994.  Comprised of horses, cave lions and other extinct animals, the paintings are 30,000 years old and were preserved only by virtue of a rockslide that encased them millennia ago. 

Part compeling account of the object, part psychological portait of those examining the object, the film spares no question too large for its audience and generally that’s a good thing.  Like all of Herzog’s films, flourishes of the brand of German quirkiness for which he’s known test the professionalism of the whole endeavour, but the depth of the subject matter ultimately sustains its own absurd epicness. Watching the scientists shine their helmets at the paintings makes us imagine they are examining alien lifeforms; and one of the things this film succeeds in arguing is finally how these artifacts are basically alien materials, given that we can never reduce their essential extra-terrestrialness. 

And anyway what is archeology, but the autopsy of dead culture, and what is an autopsy but archeology of the human body?