TY - JOUR
AU - Evans,, Georgina
AB - This essay considers how Werner Herzog’s 3D documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2011) presents the entanglement of human drawing with natural formations of rock in a place where beauty is repeatedly ascribed to both these elements – the spectacular Chauvet Cave in the Ardèche gorge in France. The accumulated marks of activity, both human and geological, are presented in the film through aesthetics of layering associated with ideas of deep time. This concept, in the simplest sense, designates geologic time, mapped out for human understanding by the stratification and transformation of matter. The primary fascination of Chauvet lies in the dazzling cave paintings discovered there in 1994, some of which have been dated at 32,000 years old. Yet even this length of time is barely a scratch in the wider span of earth time, which renders any distinction between ‘prehistory’ and ‘history’, or between the definition of ‘art’ and that of its correlates and predecessors, a brief self-indulgence of humanity. The term ‘deep time’ was coined by John McPhee, via James Hutton’s observations of geological strata in the eighteenth century.1 As Jussi Parikka describes, Hutton’s findings ‘articulated the rift between some thousands of years of biblical time and the millions of years of earth history’, opening up the realization that ‘deep temporality combined the spatial and the temporal’.2 Deep time recognizes matter as an expression of time, and time as a process of accretion and transformation of matter. The images associated with deep time – labelled cross-sections familiar from every school geography text book – offer a fantasy of excavatory visibility, neatly displaying the strata which account for the age of the earth.3 Yet the physical evidence of deep time is rarely witnessed in such tidy form, which is why McPhee celebrates the revelation provided by fresh road cuts as, to geologists, ‘a portal, a fragment of a regional story, a proscenium arch that leads their imaginations into the earth and through the surrounding terrain’.4 As McPhee suggests here, deep time, in experiential terms, is commonly a venture of the imagination, a mode of visualizing beyond surface. As geologist Marcia Bjornerud writes, ‘to think geologically is to hold in the mind’s eye not only what is visible at the surface, but also present in the subsurface, what has been and will be’.5 The idea of deep time has come forward in screen studies lately, in theories of media archaeology by Siegfried Zielinski and Parikka,6 among others. Scholars have already explored claims made in Cave of Forgotten Dreams about proto-cinematic aspects of the paintings in relation to this line of thinking.7 In this essay the focus is more literally on the way the film uses the aesthetics of deep time to point to earth movement beyond the scope of all human activity. I argue that the film communicates the passing of time, and the practice of measuring time, as processes associated with stratification and depth. This knowledge shapes the spectator’s response to the film image, revealing how even apparently distinct times and substances are characterized by porous interrelationship, and that what might appear static or solid is subject to processes of slow dynamic change. The possibility that this film might be the first and last to capture the interior of the cave (for access is severely restricted) puts a certain pressure on Herzog to deliver, to some degree, the ‘truth of accountants’ he notoriously derides, relaying facts with a certain sense of duty.8 Yet there is still space for Herzogian ‘ecstatic truth’.9 The cave paintings are fundamentally indissociable from their context; the representations work with and through the cave’s form, and the cave itself sits within a spectacular landscape. The surroundings of the gorge, and above all of the natural rock bridge the Pont d’Arc, are repeatedly displayed in sweeping drone shots, which seem, as Laurie Ruth Johnson has argued, to appeal to a sense of the sublime.10 It is the interior of the cave, though, that offers visual treasures unmatched anywhere else, and in these, argues Miriam Ross, ‘a spatial sense of the sublime is relinquished in favour of a temporal sense of the sublime, whereby we can glimpse but not fully reach the structures of the pre-modern human who created the paintings’.11 The film’s use of 3D only magnifies its preoccupation with depth. Herzog scorns popular uses of negative parallax space, which propel objects outward into the ‘space’ of the spectator,12 in favour of an exaggerated depth of field, paced out in stalactites.13 This often feels like a metaphor for recession in time, most notably when curator Domnique Baffier invites us to ‘follow’ one, recognizable, painter, and the camera then follows her from behind as she moves deeper into both the cave and an imagined past. The temporal distance between present observers and the painters is underscored by the film’s initial presentation of the cave as a preserved instant, a place discrete from what lies outside. As we watch the crew approach the present point of entry, Herzog elaborates on how Chauvet came to be preserved, telling us that the ‘cave is like a frozen flash of a moment in time’, preserved by a rock fall 20,000 years ago, ‘sealing off the original entrance to the cave and creating a perfect time capsule’. The image of a ‘frozen flash of time’ is one necessarily expressed in relative terms. We later learn that the cave contents reflect 5000 years of human activity, a period only a quarter of that which has elapsed since the rock fall, and which is of course preceded by an immeasurably greater stretch. The notion of an ‘original entrance’ can only be accepted through an anthropocentric understanding of the place, for we go on to discover an environment characterized by unfolding dynamic change, proceeding at variable rates. A key moment for this essay comes when prehistorian Jean Clottes, the former Head of Scientific Research at the cave, directs his torch at a drawing of a cave bear. As the light plays over the image, Herzog tells us in voiceover that ‘the paintings look so fresh that there were initial doubts about their authenticity. But this picture has a layer of calcite and concretions over it that take thousands of years to grow’, drawing our attention to filament-like crystals projecting outward from the surface of the rock and asserting tell-tale depth to what might otherwise appear to have remained unchanged since the moment it was decorated (figure 1). Here then, we find human creation enclosed in mineral accretion, spindly, fragile protrusions rather than thick layers of rock, but nonetheless indicative of the slow work of the earth, which acts to mark the space between one time and another. The film thus presents a complicated case in relation to Sean Cubitt’s observation that ‘the model [the biosphere] offers is fundamentally ahistorical unless and until it is broken. The act of breakage is the moment of history. The biosphere itself has no history.’14 In Cave of Forgotten Dreams, the biosphere itself, in the acute form of the rock fall and the growth of mineral structures, generates the ‘breakage’, the material difference, which enables us to observe the distance between the cinematic present and a past deemed prehistoric. When Herzog says of the painters that ‘we are locked in history, and they were not’, it is with an awareness that the processes of change, which are manifestly ongoing in the cave no matter how tightly the bank-vault style door is closed, stand to ‘lock’ us all eventually into earth time. The enfolding of human craft within mineral formations offers evidence of their age, and also presents the slowness, but absolute sureness, with which humanity stands to be subsumed in the broader sweep of the planet’s life. Fig. 1. Open in new tabDownload slide A drawing of a cave bear. All images from Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2011). Fig. 1. Open in new tabDownload slide A drawing of a cave bear. All images from Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2011). The intimation that rock may hold within it structures, and forms of dynamism, ordinarily unavailable to human vision, can hardly be claimed as an epiphany of western geology, of course.15 Indeed Chauvet’s paintings reflect hypothesized hidden depths to the cave wall, implied in the way they respond to its shape. Herzog’s uncharacteristic use of 3D for this film was, he felt, essential to communicate this: There are bulges and niches and pendants, which the artists also utilized in their drama. For example, a huge bulge in the rock now is the bulging neck of a charging bison […] When you see the film you know immediately that it was the right thing to do.16 It is striking that, in this example, the relation between the two-dimensional drawings and the form of the cave wall seems to suggest a visualization of the animals that goes literally deeper than what is drawn on the surface. As Lutz Koepnick observes, the play of light and shadow ‘reveals through the medium of touch what is considered within or behind the surface of the rock’.17 The swelling in the rock is a natural feature, but the overlaid drawing of the bison transforms it into ‘bulging muscle’, implying that the drawing gives definition to an animal body perceived as already substantially present, in a sort of natural bas-relief, perhaps.18 The scientists and art historians working in the cave 32,000 years later likewise find themselves concerned with bringing to sight what lies in the depth of the cave wall, now as a practice of decryption aimed at recuperating the cave’s contents into a timeline. Their work cannot take the form of literal excavation, but is nonetheless concerned with asserting temporal phases through the identification of material layers: places of ‘breakage’, to extend Cubitt’s model, in which the cessation of one substance and appearance of another marks a point of change. Two of these researchers are first encountered mutely holding up an image on paper within the cave, in front of a painted panel. Their identities, and the purpose of their display, are withheld until later; their introduction thus places them briefly in parallel to their prehistoric forebears as human producers of images about whom we know little else. When we later rejoin them in an office, they are flagged with their names, Carole Fritz and Gilles Tosello, and explain to us their task of divining the different phases of human and animal marking that have culminated in what we see now. Their representation breaks down what we see on the surface of the cave into a sequence of events. Cave bear scratches and human painting, apparently intermingled at first sight, are now distributed into separate drawings in chronological order. Perhaps the most startling assertion of temporal mapping as a practice of identifying distinct strata, in what might seem to be indivisible, comes when we learn that radio carbon dating produces ‘strong indications that some overlapping figures were drawn almost 5000 years apart’. The layers in which all this can be read are infinitesimally fine, yet these striated forms intimate all which is yet to accumulate, yet to come, and indeed yet to enclose human practices of inscription and interpretation. In the example of the cave bear drawing covered with calcite crystals, Herzog's explication delivers a revealing scientific differentiation of one substance from another, one time from another. Lutz Koepnick has described how, in Herzog’s suggestion of proto-cinematic interpretations of the drawings, his voiceover ‘precedes, points at, and, in this way, virtually summons what it then wants to show and prove to our eyes’.19 At one point this technique acts to unsettle our confidence in reading the cave’s substance. Soon after our first look at the cave’s paintings, the film cuts to a whirling journey through a constellation of white dots on a black background, a few points marked by labels that are too abbreviated and too fleetingly witnessed to help situate us (figure 2). Accompanying this Herzog’s voice is heard against a faint whooshing sound, which corroborates the sense of flight, telling us that ‘the painters of the cave seem to speak to us from a familiar, yet distant, universe’. As the camera perspective pulls back, we realize that we are looking at a digital map of the cave, and Herzog concludes: ‘but what we are seeing here is part of millions of spatial points’. The suggestive trailing of the word ‘universe’, swiftly followed by the refutation ‘but’, opens – just for a moment – a reading of what has thus far been understood as hard rock and empty cavity, now reimagined as a starscape. Barbara Klinger notes the use of the ‘restless camera’ in this sequence, as a technique which ‘opens closed spaces to expansive view’.20 Here the ‘closed spaces’ are not just those of the interior of the cave but potentially also those occupied by rock, for in the close-up view of the visualization we cannot distinguish the spaces between plotted points as either air or rock. This fleeting disruption of solidity launches the possibility of rock itself as a space of dynamism, where flow is possible, matter may yet transform into new states, and ultimately be totally redistributed in the cosmos. Fig. 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Rock and cavity reimagined as a starscape. Fig. 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Rock and cavity reimagined as a starscape. The film’s positing of flow through rock is a theme which becomes more significant to its understanding of time and space as we go on. We are told at the start that the cave was detected by speleologists investigating a suggestive draught of air, and the film returns to this idea in its encounter with perfumer Maurice Maurin. Herzog announces that ‘explorers, using more primal techniques in search of still hidden chambers, roam the landscape’, and we see Maurin, almost camouflaged against the dappled shade of a hillside, bending to inhale the smell of the earth, before describing how speleologists feel for air emerging from unseen caves. As Maurin’s explanation comes to a faltering end, the camera drifts away from him to centre on a dark crack in the cliff wall, and what might before have seemed a mere shadow is newly proposed as a potential aperture to another space. The film cuts from here to rejoin Maurin inside the cave, the mobility in space and time engendered by conventional film editing here cementing a growing sense of interconnectedness between inner and outer zones. The discussion of airflow through the rock reminds us that the mise-en-scene of the film image incorporates substances which, though invisible, are nonetheless in contact and interaction with what we can see. While the image of a ‘distant universe’ lets us question briefly whether rock need be read as solid, there are also moments when the film asks us to recognize that the air of the cave in no way equates to emptiness. As the camera moves into the deepest zone, Herzog alerts us that we cannot linger in the Chamber of the Lions, for ‘there is a serious level of toxic CO2 gas, emanating from the roots of trees, which seeps down into the cave through the porous limestone’. Later, Herzog relates the limits placed on visitors to Chauvet to the fact that the paintings of Lascaux have been irreparably damaged by mould resulting from the breath of ‘scores of tourists’. The film then conjures an awareness that even apparent voids, and the cavities of the human body itself, are zones filled with their own gaseous, mobile substance. The cave is marked as a porous bubble, embedded within a broader ecosystem, and the distinction between its interior and what had at first been decidedly marked as ‘outside’ is increasingly eroded. The question of what lies before us, but is not assimilable to cinematic representation, is also asserted through Herzog’s presentation of the spectacular changes wrought by water. The film takes unabashed delight in the beauty of the speleothems – stalactites, stalagmites and rippling curtain-like structures – around which the crew bend their movements. Like the calcite over the drawing of the cave bear, these formations are noted as indicators of the temporal gulf between us and the Paleolithic people, for Herzog reminds us, ‘these crystal formations take thousands of years to grow. The artists of the cave never even saw them, as many of them only started to form after the landslide sealed the entrance.’ Confronted with what rock and water have produced, the anthropocentrism of the notion that the cave ever was, or could have been, ‘sealed’ is more striking than ever. As the camera points to serpentine encrustations on the cave floor, curator Dominique Baffier notes that ‘you can see that rimstone calcite ridges have covered everything in sparkling formation; a kind of cascade … with waves’. A moment later, she indicates ‘an overflowing, drapery like concretion’, a mineral form that appears frozen in the process of oozing. As Baffier’s language suggests, the torches play over intensely familiar forms, for all these things are unmistakably the product of flow. It is, however, impossible to witness this flow in evident motion. Cinema’s capacity to compress or accelerate time is incapable of capturing this, and the camera can only gaze upon apparent stillness. Cinematic time cannot reflect visually the mobility we know to be inherent in this environment, but at the same time the film never allows us to conceive of the present moment as static. There are few familiar indicators of time available, for as photographer Stephen Alvarez has noted, being in Chauvet ‘is temporally distorting. There is no moving sun, no clocks on the wall, no bird songs or traffic noise.’21 The crew are reliant on watches to mark their strictly limited work period. This exclusion of diurnal cycles does not, however, preclude other indications of the forward motion of nature, which is expressed in aural rhythm. One much-discussed moment comes when Jean Clottes calls for stillness among those present in the cave, saying ‘We’re going to listen to the silence in the cave, and perhaps we can even hear our own hearbeats’. As the camera plays over the cave and the faces of those working there, what we hear is emphatically not silence: the soundtrack is heavy with strings and the insistent pulse of a human heartbeat, accompanied by the insistent intradiegetic drip-dripping of water. The heartbeat of course proposes a narcissistic identification both with those now in the cave and with their prehistoric forebears, the presence of human life not continuous but transmitted through the multiple short iterations represented by each body, each associated lifespan. The water beats to the same rhythm, but with a promise of enduring constancy. This water not only marks time, but also induces changes of state. Marcia Bjornerud reminds us that, for all that the popular image of earth history may consist in asserting extraordinary duration, ‘geology is not concerned with the nature of time per se but rather with its unmatched powers of transformation’.22 The cave’s transformation since humans first used it is illustrated to extravagant effect by the glittering creations of the dripping water, laden with minerals from its passage through the rock. Water seepage has already washed away at least one painting. As the camera moves across the cave floor, densely littered with animal bones, one skull sits, encrusted, amidst rivulets of shimmering mineral currents, as Herzog tells us that ‘tens of thousands of years of patient water dripping has left a thick coating of calcite on this skull; it now has the appearance of a porcelain sculpture’. The skull is still legible as such, not yet so encased as to be unrecognizable, but its eventual subsumption is written in the image and in the rhythmic promise of the dripping water (figure 3). Adrian Ivakhiv’s observation on the degradation of matter in film is apposite here: Moving image media can create viscerally felt images of the times of things – things in production and in decay, in differentiation and in synthesis, things making up the unfolding materiality of the world, of identity and of relationality (in all their narratively spun forms), and the swift, dark flow of their vanishing – to that extent cinema is a powerful tool for ecophilosophy.23 Fig. 3. Open in new tabDownload slide The skull's inevitable subsumption is written in the image. Fig. 3. Open in new tabDownload slide The skull's inevitable subsumption is written in the image. In this skull, destined to become enclosed at some unknowable future point, we encounter change not so much as ‘swift, dark flow’ but as taking place at a pace that can barely be understood as such from within the parameters of human life. Yet the slow consumption of the skull suggests how all the differentiated elements we see humans identifying, analysing and indeed generating in the film will be sedimented in one layer after another, ultimately transformed in the longer flow of earth. This awareness is compounded in the moment when Dominique Baffier shows us ‘a bear vertebra which is entirely coated in calcite, and held by calcite crystals’, her torch insistently circling what to the inexpert eye already looks like just another bump on the floor. The ‘patient dripping’ of the water, far from exhibiting the anthropomorphism implied in Herzog’s language, will ultimately thwart legibility, dissolve the possibility of history. The disparate temporalities found within the cave are situated within a landscape described with a perhaps surprising degree of constancy. Discussion of the location alludes to changes in climate and sea level since Paleolithic times, but ‘the valley’ and, above all, the natural rock bridge of the Pont d’Arc, are understood as unchanged in form. Framed against the Pont d’Arc, archaeologist Jean-Michel Geneste, director of the Chauvet Cave Research Project, suggests that the Pont d’Arc might have been ‘in the mythology of the people, not only a landmark, but a mark also in their imagination’, opening unanswerable questions about Paleolithic thinking while simultaneously ascribing continuity to the topography. If this landscape then offers a stratum sitting beneath and before all that the film examines, flowing more slowly still, Herzog overlays it all with a notoriously speculative ‘Postscript’, in which he postulates that albino crocodiles (actually alligators), housed near Chauvet, may one day view the cave. It is abundantly clear that this vision is not extrapolated from any of the cautious science we have observed. It pays no heed to the strategies for conceiving of other times thus far established, and in its deliberate refutation of those modes of thinking suggests that all this mapping of Chauvet’s ‘frozen flash of time’ will eventually be overtaken by something necessarily beyond any film’s scope. Both history and prehistory are thus figured, like the bear vertebra, as things we might now be able to claim as discernible, distinguishable from the substance of the present moment, but already sinking in the ever-accumulating matter of deep time. As in film itself, the preservation of instances, as individual frames, is observable available only through certain modes and temporalities of looking. At different speeds and scales, the apparent breakages between one frame and another, the cuts from one sequence to the next, are lost in flow. This film, all film, all media – from the first strokes of charcoal to everything which came after – are passing, fragile structures in the constant transformation of deep time. Footnotes 1 John McPhee, Basin and Range (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1980). 2 Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), p. 37. 14 Sean Cubitt, Eco-Media (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), p. 2. 16 Werner Herzog, interviewed by Jascha Hoffman, ‘Illuminating the dark’, Nature, vol. 473, no. 7345 (2011), p. 30. 17 Koepnick, ‘Herzog’s cave’, p. 279. 18 For a more detailed account of how the contours of the wall appear in 3D, see Ross, 3D Cinema, pp. 104–06. 19 Koepnick, ‘Herzog’s cave’, p. 275. 20 Klinger, ‘Cave of Forgotten Dreams’, p. 40. 21 Stephen Alvarez, ‘Shooting Chauvet: photographing the world’s oldest cave art’, National Geographic, 5 January 2015, <https://www.nationalgeographic.com/photography/proof/2015/01/05/shooting-chauvet-photographing-the-worlds-oldest-cave-art/> accessed 23 March 2020. 22 Bjornerud, Timefulness, p. 22. 23 Adrian Ivakhiv, Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2013), p. 307. 3 See, for example, ibid., p. 39, fig. 4. 4 McPhee, Basin and Range, p. 10. 5 Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), p. 22. 6 Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means, trans. Gloria Custance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); Parikka, A Geology of Media. 7 See Lutz Koepnick, ‘Herzog’s cave: on cinema’s unclaimed pasts and forgotten futures’, The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, vol. 88, no. 3 (2013), pp. 271–85. The work of Mark Azéma offers a wider consideration of Paleolithic images as proto-cinematic, in particular La Préhistoire Du Cinéma: Origines Paléolithiques De La Narration Graphique et du Cinématographe (Paris: Errance, 2011). 8 Werner Herzog, ‘The Minnesota Declaration: truth and fact in documentary cinema – “Lessons in Darkness”’, in Paul Cronin (ed.), Herzog on Herzog (London: Faber and Faber: 2002), p. 300. 9 Ibid. 10 Laurie Ruth Johnson, Forgotten Dreams: Revisiting Romanticism in the Cinema of Werner Herzog (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2016). 11 Miriam Ross, 3D Cinema: Optical Illusions and Tactile Experiences (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 114. 12 From the video interview, Herzog: What I Saw in the Cave (Roger Ebert, 2010) <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7H-VodcRG4o&feature=player_embedded> accessed 23 March 2020. 13 For more discussion of Herzog’s 3D depth of field, see Barbara Klinger. ‘Cave of Forgotten Dreams: meditations on 3D’, Film Quarterly, vol. 65, no. 3 (2012), pp. 38–43. 15 Bjornerud notes that ‘some non-Western cultures had pre-scientific concepts of “Deep Time”, and it was “biblical doctrine”’ that held back European geology. Timefulness, p. 193 fn. 2. © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Deep time in Cave of Forgotten Dreams
JF - Screen
DO - 10.1093/screen/hjaa025
DA - 2020-06-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/deep-time-in-cave-of-forgotten-dreams-ymXOfF2Iyz
SP - 306
EP - 314
VL - 61
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -