A (Way-overdue) review of Cave of Forgotten Dreams

        

(Cave of Forgotten Dreams/ Creative Differences, 2011)

           The Chauvet cave in the south of France is an odd place. Located on the side of a cliff like an accidental puncture, it was undiscovered and almost impossible to access until three French archeologists turned it up in 1994, after noticing gaseous fumes emanating from the rocks. Those three explorers were Jean Marie Chauvet, Christian Hillaire and Eliette Brunel, all to whom Cave of Forgotten Dreams is dedicated. What they uncovered was a cave filled with the oldest paintings known to man. Paintings of horses, bulls, female genitalia. In frozen motion.

            The cave of Werner Herzog’s career is no less odd than the Chauvet cave, but it has been in its dullest, most recyclable phase for the past decade. The most positive summary that may be given to Cave of Forgotten Dreams is that it is a welcome reprieve from this phase. With Invincible, Herzog resorted to making another Holocaust schmaltz-epic; with Rescue Dawn, he re-made his own documentary, and morphed it in to a hulky piece of Americana action; with Encounters at the End of the World he encountered nothing new in a place he seemed to be visiting simply because he had not shot a film there yet. Nobody can accuse of Herzog not exploring new territory this time. The film is shot mostly in and around the cave, establishing the clearest sense of space Herzog has given us in years, and glittering with the palpable mysticism and romantic possibilities that he has been desperately trying to reconnect with. The inside of the cave looks what you would expect the inside of a cave to look like, but even darker and weirder. Bones litter the ground, the stalactites are massive and look alien with their shiny whiteness, and the paintings—but we should stop here. The best way the paintings can be described is in Herzog’s own words; “almost a form of proto-cinema.” The best way they can be seen is to look at them. This film has us look in 3-D.

(Fred Astaire dancing in Cave of Forgotten Dreams/)

            Herzog’s comments about the suggestion of motion in the paintings of running bulls—the proto-cinema comment—are actually the key to this film. Cave of Forgotten Dreams is almost a form of film criticism. In its best moments, it is playful art history. Herzog compares the paintings to the romantic impulse in the music of Wagner and the German romantic painters and, despite his tendency towards pretty hyperbole, we believe him this time. He interviews art historians and follows an archeologist in to the cave, who gives us a guided tour of one man’s handprint, distinguishable by a crooked finger, that appears on stones throughout the cave. He gives us isolated close-ups of artifacts found in other caves and compares them to the material in Chauvet. He follows around Michel Phillipe, one of the heads of the cave preservation effort, in spear-throwing excursions and in to archival safes. Herzog is a quietly ambivalent filmmaker; on one hand, he shuns analysis, preferring to have use gaze at the cave paintings again and again, following the arc of a flashlight that scans them. On the other hand, he is a master scrutinizer, a semi-critic. Anybody who has read the fascinating Herzog on Herzog knows that he is not so bad at this stuff. Why else would he have built up one of the more idiosyncratic bodies of work in documentaries? Herzog and his interview subjects see art, speculate on it, make connections to the romantics, Picasso and Fred Astair, and, only towards the end of the film bring us back to the elephant in the room; the camera. If all these cave paintings were the beginnings of an ongoing movement up to and including cinema, then what of the dolly shot that ends in a crew member (possibly Peter Zeitlinger, Herzog’s late-period DP), cupping his hands over the lens? Cave of Forgotten Dreams suggests to us that all creation becomes uncertain at some point, and that all art must be, to some degree, incomprehensible.

            The hands cupping the camera should have ended the film. We could have done without a tedious epilogue about crocodiles. But what those critical hands and Herzog’s trance-ish Bavarian drawl cannot fix is the 3-D. Despite the sudden adjustment to this new gloss on film, 3-D here does exactly what it does with any other film, which is distract us. The cave paintings may “jump out” in 3-D, but why can’t Herzog be content with them jumping out in our memories? He may have become so agitated by the uncertainty of the paintings—they date from thousands of years apart, by estimations—that he felt the film had to be at least aesthetically certain. But the 3-D in this film is like an aesthetic buzzing fly in too many scenes. We don’t need to see actual interviews in 3-D. Nor do we need to see a spear being thrown of the fantastic mountainous landscapes with any enhancement. These images are already justified as a part of the story. All that the 3-D even artificially enhances are the cave paintings. When it is not artificial, it is just a drag on what is otherwise a piece of speculation and sympathy. Were Herzog the disciplined, more cynical filmmaker still around, such a technique would not have been considered. 

(Cave of Forgotten Dreams/Creative Differences, 2011)

            But this is 2011, and the German New Wave is over. Wim Wenders, another German new-waver, is taking the same 3-D route as Herzog with his documentary on Pina Bausch. There is seemingly nothing more German film-giant than moving to California, which is what Herzog did in the mid-90’s, as did Fritz Lang and F.W Murnau in their day. But it is good to see that he has set aside America as a place where romantic ecstasy might be found, and returned to the ancient strangeness of Europe. It is good to see Herzog tramping the ground of phenomena, dreams in motion and unforgiving nature again.  A scene with an “experimental archeologist” who dresses in deerskin and plays The Star Spangled Banner on a wooden flute is a cousin image to the  men on rocks being slashed by the sea in Heart of Glass (1976), or Bruno S. performing in a Berlin alley in Stroszek (1977). Herzog has insisted that all his films are somehow Bavarian, but Cave of Forgotten Dreams feels, to this American, the closest he has come to equating his earlier German films in many years. So it is such a pity that it has to fall short of Herzog’s earlier work, by falling prey to gloss. “The lives of filmmakers have frequently ended badly,” Herzog told Paul Cronin in Herzog on Herzog. “The strongest of the animals have been brought to their knees eventually.” If we substitute work for life, then we sadly might get a picture of the later part of Herzog’s career. Perhaps he saw it coming. Thank god his overall body is still one of the wonders of cinema.

(Cave of Forgotten Dreams/ Creative Differences, 2011)

Motion Studies: Dances with Fish

        

       Ruminating on Monty Python’s imagery need not be reserved for professional comedians and unprofessional goofballs. It should also be the practice of filmmakers, at whatever level of professionalism they may be. Because even though Monty Python’s Flying Circus was a television show, and even though nobody thinks to watch any one of its sketches on a big screen, it is hard to find a more stylized chunk of moving imagery than that of two WWI-era soldiers on an elevated pier, the one on the right dancing in a back and forth in a jog-prance motion slapping the stoic soldier standing in front of him with a fish in each hand over and over, as the water from a dam laps below them.

            Key to this image is exactly how it was shot. The jerky quickness of the water, not the mention the speed of the man, show that the scene is shot in fast motion, possibly at 17 frames a second. It is not much less than 24 frames, because the speed is at first not discernable. If the speed were too fast, it would probably not be very funny. But not only is the speed well controlled; the timing is as minute as a military drill. When the soldier with the fish stops dancing, the standing soldier draws a massive fish from his side pocket and elegantly smacks the dancing soldier across the cheek. He topples in to the water where he is swallowed by an animated Nazi-fish. None of this scene registers as too fast as our eyes process it, but when we watch it again, we realize that it’s an absurdity compounding an absurdity. Nobody slaps anybody else with a fish while dancing. Even if they do, they can’t do it quite that fast.

            Aside from being stylized, aside from being funny, this image is also tragic. Tragic, because it was screened on television rather than in a cinema. Tragic, because there is an audience laugh-track, not organic laughter. Tragic, because the scene is so short. It lasts not much more than thirty seconds, perhaps due to broadcasting constraints, perhaps because its creators were afraid that if it lasted longer, it would lose its humor. They should have known, as they knew in their several of their features, that after a certain amount of seconds you can push humorous concerns to the side. If we saw that soldier dance with his two fish for thirty or sixty seconds longer, all the lunacy in a motion, all the absurdity in the act of filming, all the beauty in a shot, might be revealed.

News: New Days

(Gus Van Sant/ New York Times, 2011)

Filmmaker Gus Van Sant's latest film, Restless, deals with a young person with cancer and how it affects the lives of her friends and family. It premiered at Cannes this month. Some are saying it marks a return to minimalist yet experimental style the director has grappled with in previous films, such as Elephant and Last Days. In a broader context, it's another film on the theme of premature death; more accurately, the context surrounding a premature death, that the director has long been preoccupied by. See this brief but interesting interview in the New York Times for more information.
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/13/gus-van-sant-on-young-love-and-young-death/?hpw

Sympathy for Delicious

(Sympathy for Delicious/Maya Entertainment, 2011)

       

      Sympathy for Delicious is, possibly, the sort of film nobody quite knows what to do with because it is a religious film. No other American film in recent memory has taken magic-realism so head-on, or presented the story of the rise and fall of one man with less irony. But first-time director Mark Ruffalo does it with this film. Even when it falls flat on its face, even when his characters have nowhere left to go but keep going, his film might announce itself in the mind of the not-completely-cynical movie-lover as something nearly as important as stained-glass in a cathedral. Let's call it a worthy decoration.

        The film, written by and starring Christopher Thornton, begins on skid row, or some version of it. We can’t imagine the real skid row having quite the apocalyptic charm or grimy sense of solitude this place has. But such is the whole look of Ruffalo’s film, which takes the form of a fable from the outset. We only get a real sense of what is happening when Dean O’ Dwyer, or Delicious D (Christopher Thornton) clasps his hands on the head of a homeless man suffering from dementia and causes him to fall back in to a heap of junk, looking somehow better. In the ensuing shot, a perplexed Dean examines his hands, a cigarette hanging from his mouth like a question mark. He is examining them because he felt something, and this something is the ability to heal people’s ailments through faith. We will see a lot more of Thornton’s hands in the film, because they are the most important image in the film. Dean is also a turntablist—hence the stage name “Delicious D”—as well as a cripple from the waist down. This man’s ability to heal others does not extend to himself. It does not even work on others one-hundred percent of the time. But it is enough for a priest named father Joe (Ruffalo), who has been trying to help Dean and others on skid row for years, to conclude that Dean is channeling the will of God with his healing powers. Father Joe then foists him on the downtrodden of skid row in an effort to gain donations in addition to healing them. 

(Sympathy for Delicious/Maya Entertainment, 2011)

            It is also enough for Dean to take matters in to his own…well, his own hands. He hooks up with a rock outfit that includes a singer called Ariel Lee (Juliette Lewis) and an affected guitarist known as The Stain (Orlando Bloom), who want him to heal people as their sideshow act. It is with this narrative branch that Thornton and Ruffalo apply their broadest strokes, but with these broad strokes come some of the film’s sillier qualities. One of the paradoxes of Delicious is that he is a self-destructive curmudgeon, someone more than willing to straddle the capitalist system whenever he gets a shot. But this paradox is numbed by the presence of the band members, in particular Bloom, who gives a self-consciously unsubtle performance as a rock star cliché. (Sympathy for Delicious may be a fable, but stereotypes remain stereotypes in fables.) It also introduces a wasted performance by Laura Linney as the band manager, Nina. Appearing in only a few scenes, Nina does not have much to do until the third act, when she is desperately given a few lines to deliver to father Joe, only then suggesting an inner conflict. Ruffalo does not have a superb sense of timing, and it is a pity that Thornton’s script can’t guide him more often. It even throws in a highly unnecessary final scene worthy of Spielberg.

            But what lifts Sympathy for Delicious above these tragic flaws is the sense that the film is invested in the spiritual idea of being flawed. The film could be a cinematic allegory of the first several passages of the Book of Genesis. Man is born, man is naïve, man is tempted by an apple, man picks the apple, incurring God’s displeasure. Or it could be a film that is earnestly, sentimentally, entertainingly—Ruffalo and Thornton do get entertainment—raises questions about faith.

            Faith, and Thornton’s hands. He sits in his wheelchair, in shots ranging from close-ups to extreme close-ups. Throngs of the sick and infirm poor surround him. The sun is out, but the scene looks faded, unsure of its light. Father Joe skids back and forth through the many bodies, patiently guiding the patrons to their server. Delicious D clasps his hands on heads and shoulders without hesitation, but always with reluctance. The healed always fall back, wide eyed, and a cry of awe is elicited from the crowd. A woman pulls off her emphysema mask. A man looks to the sky and wrings his hands. Delicious shakes his head as he fails to feel the surge of God’s will connecting to one man, one of the few non-connections that day. Father Joe pans a hat around, collecting wads of dollars. Delicious D knows of the wads of dollars and is tired of working in good faith under the sun, mobbed by the downtrodden. We will hear no evil, speak no evil. But what constitutes evil? The lord upholds all who fall and lifteth up all who are bowed down. The coming of God, the coming of God…

(Sympathy for Delicious/Maya Entertainment, 2011)