Cave of Forgotten Dreams: Werner Herzog’s latest ’documentary’

After German film director Werner Herzog’s latest documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, ended at a recent screening held at New York’s DGA Theater as part of the New Yorker Magazine festival, the director himself took the stage for a Q&A. Among the Q’s posed, was a scornful one, coming from a woman whose voice was infused with the pain of betrayal,

“How can you ever expect us to trust you again after what you’ve done?”

 

But displeasure was the exception. Most of the audience was enthralled even before the lights had a chance to dim. Introducing the film was writer Judith Thurman, whose June 2008 New Yorker article first alerted Herzog to the cave’s existence. You are not only among the first to witness the film, Thurman explained to those in attendance, but are about to be among the first non-scientists to see the 32,000 year-old works of cave-art hidden inside.

 

The theater then went dark as Herzog’s narration enveloped the room with its at-once emphatic, abrasive, and poetic tone. He is the omnipotent tour guide lifting the velvet rope, granting us access to places that a general audience would otherwise never see.

 

With his narration, Herzog takes liberties that few other filmmakers do, meshing his own perceptions with the facts at will. In 2005 Herzog introduced us to Timothy Treadwell, AKA Grizzly Man, the story of a man whose believed kinship with grizzly bears was debunked when he became their dinner.

“What haunts me,” Herzog says at a pivotal moment in Grizzly Man, “is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature.”

 

For the subject of his 2007 film, Herzog focused on peoples’ Encounters at the End of the World, documenting the environment and working conditions of the scientists and supporting staff who work in the arctic. When the subject of climate change is touched upon, Herzog’s voiceovers accrue an added intensity. “Life is part of an endless chain of catastrophes,” Herzog says, “the demise of the dinosaurs being just one of these events. We seem to be next.”

 

Another rare device Herzog utilizes in his ‘documentaries’ is lying. At the end of Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Herzog visits a biosphere near the cave to focus on a few albino crocodiles, their white skin we are told, is a result of being removed from their cave habitat. After the credits, Herzog’s signature voice persisted, seeping off the screen to the live theater as if the post Q&A were the film’s final act. He came clean right away. “I just want to say that the albino crocs were in actuality rare alligator specimens that I filmed in an aquarium. But so what?”

 

If he won over any new fans it was not from what he said after the film. Unfazed by the increasing popularity of some of his least favorite interests, over the course of the 30-minute Q&A, Herzog bashed New Age philosophy, psychotherapy, and yoga, which he called, “an abomination.” But everyone laughed when he answered the angered woman.

“You can’t ever trust me. It’s a movie.”

He continued to explain that his films are not an attempt to uncover only the truth, but a deeper sort of truth as he sees it, “the ecstasy of truth,” which sometimes requires him to lie, fictionalize, or supplement facts with his own observations. While some critics and moviegoers don’t take kindly to these methods, most tolerate them. His fans could either not care less, view his ambitions as grounds for further adoration, or find it loveable. Before the film began, fake German accents could be heard intermittently throughout the theater, and Herzog impersonations are a hit on Youtube, the best done by a fan who wrote and spoke Herzog-inspired narration to accompany images taken from one of the Where’s Waldo Books.

 

Because of the environment’s sensitivity and restricted access that limited Herzog’s shoot to four crew, four days, and four hours each day, even producing a finished film was an achievement in and of itself. Furthermore, anyone who has spent a Sunday watching National Geographic or Discovery Channel knows that making a compelling feature length movie about cave art is not an easy task, but by drawing out the colorful personalities of the scientists involved, composing interesting and well lit-shots cut to an outstanding operatic score by Ernst Reijseger, and of course, using his signature narration, Herzog has provided a tour of the cave that is an experience worth the cost of admission.

 

Cave of Forgotten Dreams was picked up for  distribution by IFC films and will be released in theaters sometime in 2011.