There are few filmmakers better suited than Werner Herzog to stand before humanity’s oldest known artworks and ask what, exactly, they mean. Across documentaries like Grizzly Man and Encounters at the End of the World, Herzog has spent decades pursuing people and places that seem to exist at the fringes of ordinary experience. With Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010), he turns his attention backward across tens of thousands of years, descending into the Chauvet Cave in southern France to confront some of the earliest surviving expressions of human imagination.
Catch Cave of Forgotten Dreams in its triumphant return to theaters, shown in 3D from June 5-11th at the Laemmle Glendale.
Discovered in 1994 and ordinarily closed to the public, the Chauvet Cave contains paintings estimated to be more than 30,000 years old: rhinoceroses, horses, lions, bison, mammoths, and other animals sketched across stone walls with astonishing sophistication. Herzog and a tiny film crew were granted rare access to the cave, resulting in a documentary that feels less like a conventional history lesson than an encounter with something profoundly uncanny. The cave becomes, in Herzog’s hands, not merely an archaeological site but a kind of lost cathedral, suspended outside ordinary time.
The decision to film in 3D proves especially inspired. Rather than using the format for spectacle, Herzog employs it to emphasize the contours and textures of the cave walls themselves, revealing how the ancient artists incorporated the natural curvature of the rock into their drawings. The paintings seem almost to move as the camera glides past them, lending weight to Herzog’s suggestion that these images function as a kind of “proto-cinema,” like an attempt to capture motion long before the invention of film itself.
As always, Herzog’s unmistakable narration hovers somewhere between philosophical inquiry, deadpan comedy, and cosmic bewilderment. He approaches the cave with genuine awe, but also with the peculiar curiosity that has long defined his documentaries. As archaeologists, paleontologists, and art historians offer technical insights into the methods and possible meanings behind the paintings, Herzog repeatedly nudges the discussion toward stranger and more existential territory. What does it mean that human beings, so early in recorded history, already felt compelled to create images like these? Were the paintings artistic, spiritual, communal, or something else entirely that modern language cannot adequately describe?
What emerges is not a film interested in providing definitive answers so much as one fascinated by the persistence of mystery itself. Herzog treats the cave less as a puzzle to be solved than as a prototype of that same inclination toward storytelling, symbolism, and image-making that still defines human culture today.
Few documentaries inspire awe quite this naturally. Seen in 3D, Cave of Forgotten Dreams becomes something increasingly rare: a film that genuinely expands one’s sense of human history, while quietly reminding us how much remains unknowable.
“As usual, human progress gets the sublimely absurd Herzogian treatment.” – Eric Kohn, IndieWire
“The Chauvet cave is a lost cathedral, and Herzog’s film responds with subdued passion to its profound mystery.” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian