Movie Review: The Cave of Forgotten Dreams

For several weeks now, I had been hoping to see this film, and I was starting to get a little antsy. I really wanted to see it in theaters; if I couldn't, then there didn't seem to be a point. This is because the 3D nature of the film is so integral to the experience that viewing it in a paltry two dimensions would really just be a waste of your time. Don't get me wrong, you'd still learn a lot, and it's a very thought-provoking film, but the whole reason that Werner Herzog & Co. got a special permit from the French government to film inside the Chauvet caves was so that they could give people all over the world the chance to stand nose-to-nose with primeval history.

First off, it's not a very long film. Only about 90 minutes or so. That's almost equal to the time it actually took to shoot the whole thing! Actually, slightly less, but their time inside was severely limited. The French government is highly wary of letting too many people into the caves; their delicate, perfectly balanced climates are the only reason that these paintings look so fresh. (If not for the thin layers of calcified deposits, you'd think they were painted yesterday.) The French government tried opening another nearby cave to tourists, and the collective moisture from their breath caused mold to grow on the cave walls, so access to the caves is highly restricted, and highly limited on the exceedingly rare occasions when it is granted.


The Chauvet caves were discovered a mere 15 years ago, almost by accident, by a trio of amateur spelunkers. They contain cave-paintings from as far back as 32,000 years ago! That's six times as old as the pyramids, folks! Sixteen times as old as Christianity! Eighty times as old as the freaking concept of gravity! These paintings, made from simple plant dyes and applied by the flickering lights of torches, are considerably older than the human mind could ever really hope to comprehend.

And they're gorgeous! The level of detail that went into these things, despite their apparent simplicity, is really something that can only be achieved by living in close proximity to these animals for your entire life.


In one corner, a pair of woolly rhinoceroses battle one another. One can almost hear the impact, feel the shaking of the earth as these enormous beasts collide. Nearby, a bull bison gallops out of an alcove, seeming to barrel right past the viewer. Elsewhere, running gazelles and horses are drawn with multiple legs, to create an illusion of rapid movement, more than thirty millennia before comic-book artists would rediscover the technique for their own use.

In every case, the placement of the creatures is by no means random or haphazard. Some juxtaposed images were actually painted thousands of years apart! This means that these early humans had generations in which to figure out the perfect placement of each animal, each limb, each subtle nuance of position and composition. Every painting in the cave is carefully placed, in a way that utilizes the natural flow and bulge of the cave wall to accentuate the form of each creature, and even create the illusion of movement.


The summer when I was twelve, my family took a vacation to Mammoth Caves National Park in Kentucky, one of the largest cave systems in the world. At one point during the tour, about halfway through, the guide led us into a large cavern, and she asked us, for just a moment, to be completely silent and still, while she turned out the lights for a moment. My family did a lot of things on that trip, but that moment of absolute darkness and unbroken silence remains, to this day, one of my most vivid memories of that entire trip. The darkness was so complete, I could almost feel it hovering over and around me, pressing itself against the very surface of my eyeballs.

The Cave of Forgotten Dreams was a lot like that moment of darkness, in a way. Watching this film gives one an almost tangible feeling of being in the presence of some enormous, invisible, unknowable thing, which, if you were to reach out your hand to its extremity, your fingertips might just barely brush against something hairy, and warm, and much, much older than you.

Book Review: "Longutude," by Dava Sobel, 1995

Living in Warren and working in Ann Arbor is draining, on my gas tank, my time, and my sanity. To ease the monotony of the hour-long commute, I've taken to borrowing audio books from the Ann Arbor Library, to keep my mind occupied. Thanks to this, I've finally gotten around to reading (well, hearing anyway) a book that I've been meaning to read for no less than fifteen years: Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time, by Dava Sobel.

Longitude tells the story of John Harrison, a West Yorkshire carpenter who built what is universally regarded as one of the most important clocks in human history, the marine chronometer, without apprenticeship or training in the principles of clock-making. His machine was nothing short of a miracle; in an age where clocks could gain or lose as much as an hour a day on dry land, Harrison’s fourth sea-clock, “H4,” kept time to within five seconds during a six-week sea-voyage from England to Jamaica! (My mind has officially been boggled by this Harrison guy.)

Longitude a fascinating read. More than once I found myself gasping with surprise or laughing with amazement at the "true story of a lone genius who solved the greatest scientific problem of his time." I had no idea how difficult and dangerous seafaring used to be. Even in calm weather, and with favorable winds, every sea-journey taken beyond sight of land involved becoming lost at sea at some point. Sailors could find their way by the stars, but Polaris could only tell you how far north or south you were; it was impossible to judge your position relative to east or west. “In literally hundreds of instances, a vessel’s ignorance of her position led swiftly to her destruction” [Sobel].

For example: in October 1707, Admiral Sir Cloudesley-Shovell of the H.M.S. Association was returning to England with five warships under his command, after a victory against the French navy. The Admiral and his navigators believed themselves charting a safe course for northern England, but a sailor told them that he had been keeping his own private reckoning of their position, and feared that they would be smashed to flinders on the rocky cliffs of the Scilly islands.

The Admiral had him hanged instantly. It was insubordination verging on mutiny for a sailor, an uneducated seaman, to second-guess the judgment of his betters; it invited dissent and rebellion. But within 24 hours, just as the unfortunate sailor had predicted, the cliffs of Scilly loomed out of the fog, and four of Admiral Cloudesley’s five ships “pricked themselves on the rocks and went down like stones” [Sobel]. In the space of five minutes, the rocks became the unmarked graves of nearly 1,5000 English sailors.

In light of this disaster, Parliament offered a prize of £20,000 (millions of dollars in today’s money) to anyone who could come up with an accurate and reliable method for telling time at sea, so that sailors could compare their perception of midday with the local time in their home-port, and figure out how far they were from home. Harrison’s clocks were entered into the contest, but Nevil Maskelyne, Harrison’s arch-nemesis, did everything in his power to discredit Harrison and deny him the prize, insisting that his own Method of Lunar Distances was far superior. (Even if it did take four hours to compute, and didn’t work on cloudy nights, new moons, or when the sea was rough.)

All in all, it’s a really good book. It made the science (and the danger, and the back-stabbing) come alive for me. John Harrison could easily be seen as a stuffy old man in a powdered wig, but this book made him flesh-and-blood, a real human being with real emotions, foibles, and shortcomings. Check this book out! Especially if you’re a scientist with children, or an elementary-, middle-, or high-school teacher who needs a way to get kids interested in science. It might be a bit dry for the ones who aren’t already into that stuff, but the book begins with a story about a massive shipwreck that's sure to hook anyone’s attention. After all, who can resist the lure of human tragedy?