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.
The cave in question is the Chauvet Cave in the Ardeche Gorge in the south of France, a review of a new film by Guardian writer Simon Mcburney which is being released on the 25th March. This marvellous cave full of exquisite animal drawings said to date back 30,000 years, is not open to the public but Werner Herzog, a radical German producer, has managed to persuade the French authorities to allow him to film inside the cave.
A trailer of the film can be found here on the Fortean Times website.
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26/03/2011 at 07:53
Littlestone
These paintings really are extraordinary. Herzog says we haven’t really bettered them in over 30,000 years. He also goes on to say the duplication of drawn/painted lines (seen in the legs and heads of animals) was an attempt to suggest motion – an early ‘cinematographic’ technique in other words. That’s amazing, given how old they are. And it’s easy to see how alive, and realistic, these painted animals would have appeared in the light of flickering oil lamps (no doubt enhanced even further by the uneven surface on which they were executed).
Marcel Duchamp used the duplication of lines technique to suggest motion in his Nude Descending a Staircase. There’s a Taoist temple in China with a mural that shows a court official whose eyes are painted using the duplication technique, as if to suggest he’s lowering them in the presence of the emperor. In Kyoto National Museum there’s a life-size wooden sculpture of a standing Bodhisattva; the face is split vertically down the centre to reveal an identical face within, and this second face is again split vertically to reveal a third face; not just motion here but perhaps something even more awe-inspiring… though the 32,000 year old Chauvet cave paintings are pretty mind-blowing by any standards!