Dots and Lines in the Chauvet cave. Image: Jean Collins/New Scientist
In his new film about the paleolithic art in the Chauvet Cave, Werner Herzog is interviewing a scientist whose task is to laser-map the cave: “It like you are creating the phone directory of Manhattan, four million precise entries, but do they dream? Do they cry at night? What are their hopes? What are their families? We’ll never know from the phone directory.”
No, no they left the art! It is so much more than we can possibly know about our contemporaries. In fact I have this sensation in Manhattan. It seems to me that all people are playing a certain theatrical role. I see a flock of teenage girls in very short skirts and very long heels playing the role of a giggler about town. I see a woman on the Upper East Side playing the role of a fashionable dame with a plastic smile fixed permanently to her mask. I see a gay couple jumping cross the avenue in the designer stylized “wife beaters”. But who they all really are?
Werner Herzog is precise with the scores for his films but he had a miss here. Ernst Reijseger recorded organ music accompanied by the vocals. Organ was born inside the soaring walls of the Gothic cathedrals. Gothic is porous and permeable and it flows upward into infinity… The organ reflects the Gothic architecture with the pointed pipes releasing the melodic air beyond the skin. A cave is just the opposite, it is contained and sealed. The smooth in surface, molded into art celebrating the animal spirits instead of trying to transcend it. With one exception all the Chauvet Cave frescoes are in the dark parts of the cave, where there is no natural light from the entrance. This is the music of the vocal throttle reverberating as an echo, the primal hunting scream of Natasha Rostova in the War and Peace.
It must be said that the soothing voice of Werner Herzog put to sleep many people in the theater only to be awaken by the vividness of the three-dimensional envelope. This was a surprise.
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