Just when I was ready to write off 3-D as a scam by Hollywood to collect inflated ticket prices for medi ocre, murky-looking blockbusters, here comes the most compelling use of the process since “Avatar” — eccentric German director Werner Herzog’s haunting, eye-popping documentary “Cave of Forgotten Dreams.”
Stereoscopic photography lends itself beautifully to this exploration of an enormous series of caverns in Chauvet-Pont d’Arc, France, where the sloping walls are covered by exquisitely preserved drawings of animals and more abstract shapes that are as much as 32,000 years old.
Sealed by a rock slide for 25,000 years, the caves were discovered in 1994 and have been zealously guarded against contamination by the French government.
The paintings are so spectacular — they look like they were done yesterday — that there was initial skepticism about their authenticity. Most experts now think they are “one of the greatest discoveries in the history of human culture,” as Herzog puts it in his English-language narration.
Armed with an endorsement from the French Ministry of Culture, Herzog was granted permission to film, but with rigorous conditions to preserve the site. The time was strictly limited, and Herzog and cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger could use only a small 3-D rig and three battery-powered cold lights. They couldn’t get too close — they had to stay on a 2-foot-wide walkway built by the cave’s conservators.
Herzog turns these limitations into an asset; his stories about the filming are almost as interesting as the caves themselves, filled with drawings of horses, lions, rhinos and bears — as well as animal skeletons and dramatic stalactites.
Working with extremely limited lighting, Herzog not only gives a sense of the caves as a sinuous, tactile environment, but focuses on the movement suggested by the paintings.
He describes the latter as “a form of proto-cinema” and is inspired to offer a clip of Fred Astaire’s famous shadow dance from “Swing Time.”
As much a study of prehistoric art as archaeology, this documentary brings in experts to speculate about the mysterious artists who made these paintings, some quite elaborate and others intriguingly abstract.
At least one painter left a signature — a crooked finger, which is visible on several paintings. Ernst Reijseger’s lovely score greatly enhances the feeling you’re literally looking across millennia into the distant past.
“Cave of Forgotten Dreams” is in some ways the most straightforward of Herzog’s documentaries — though he does slip in an albino alligator he claims has been spawned by nuclear power-plant waste near the caves. The only way it could possibly be improved would be to exhibit it in IMAX.