Culture Shock 12.08.11: These 'Dreams' old but not forgotten

The one thing that strikes me as off about Werner Herzog's documentary "Cave of Forgotten Dreams" is the title.

As we see, these dreams have not been forgotten. They've lived on, surfacing at other times and in other places, long after the cave vanished beneath a rock slide some 20,000 years ago, to be rediscovered only in 1994.

Maybe "Dreams of the Forgotten Cave" is the more accurate title, even if it sounds a bit too much like an Indiana Jones movie crossed with an H.P. Lovecraft story.

The cave is Chauvet Cave, located in southern France and site of the earliest known cave paintings, some of which are between 30,000 and 33,000 years old. As Herzog tells us, that makes them twice as old as any other known prehistoric paintings.

The cave of Altamira in northern Spain — subject of an admiring Steely Dan song, "The Caves of Altamira" — contains paintings generally thought to be about 15,000 years old, although some researchers argue for some of them being as old as the oldest Chauvet paintings.

That, however, is an archaeological dispute for another day, and one that probably doesn't interest Herzog in the slightest.

Given special permission to film in Chauvet — under severe restrictions — Herzog descended with a small crew and advanced 3-D cameras. Confined to a narrow walkway and limited to just four hours a day during six shooting days, Herzog and company nevertheless emerged with remarkable footage that Herzog has fashioned into an equally remarkable film, enhanced by Ernst Reijseger's melancholy score.

The paintings are astonishing for their age. These prehistoric artists capture horses, bison, lions, bears, mammoths and woolly rhinos in unmistakable detail. They simulate the movement of fleeing beasts by giving them extra legs.

More remarkable still, they use the irregularities and contours of the cave walls as part of their paintings. In the torchlight, Herzog notes, these creatures must have seemed to come to life.

For once, the 3-D is worth it. Viewing "Cave of Forgotten Dreams" in the standard two dimensions, you miss the three-dimensional tricks that play out over Chauvet's walls, and which Herzog recreates. Leave it to a 3-D skeptic such as Herzog to finally put the technology to good use. I wouldn't suggest purchasing a 3-D TV and Blu-ray player just for this film, but if you have them already, this is a film you must own, if for no other reason than to show off your home theater.

Perhaps the cavemen who left these paintings were showing off, too.

There is no evidence anyone ever inhabited Chauvet, so its purpose was likely ceremonial. Maybe it was the world's first art gallery, or maybe it was just the world's first graffiti.

In evolutionary psychology, there's a hypothesis that art, like the peacock's tail, is something used to attract a mate. Maybe we're looking at the works of prehistoric Don Juans trying to impress a girl.

The normally fatalistic Herzog (see his "Encounters at the End of the World") seems drawn to these artists as kindred spirits. They, too, document the world around them and seek meaning in symbols. The closest thing we find to a depiction of a human among the horses and rhinos is symbolic — part-woman/part-bison. It's the earliest blending of human and beast, starting a tradition that goes through Egyptian hieroglyphs and continues today in the pages of Batman and Spider-Man comic books.

Who were these Ice Age people who left behind only their art and their hand prints? What were their hopes and fears? In the end, they seem very much like us, and their dreams are our dreams.

In his career-long search for what he calls "ecstatic truth," a truth deeper than mere facts, Herzog has never come closer.

Thankfully, he takes us along for the ride.

Werner Herzog reads 'Go the F**k to Sleep' [NSFW]

Culture Shock 05.06.10: Nicolas Cage flirts with insanity in New Orleans

Directing "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call — New Orleans" is not the greatest challenge of Werner Herzog's film-making career. He did not, after all, have to drag a steamboat over a mountain. He just had to direct Nicolas Cage.

Since winning his Oscar, Cage has turned in a number of lackluster performances. The less said of "Ghost Rider," the better. But in New Orleans police Lt. Terence McDonagh — the titular bad lieutenant — Cage has found a role that suits his eccentricities.

Perhaps that is what drew Herzog to make a film that, at first glance, doesn't seem like a Herzog film. The title suggests either a remake of Abel Ferrara's "Bad Lieutenant," which starred Harvey Keitel, or a sequel. But it is neither.

Herzog has long gravitated toward obsessed or deranged characters, finding more truth in them than in mundane reality. How else could he have survived his long partnership with Klaus Kinski, which he documented in the film "My Best Fiend"? Now, with Cage, Herzog has formed a new partnership. But the insanity remains in front of the camera. This time, there are no urban legends of the uncompromising German director threatening his star with a gun.

Lt. McDonagh, however, threatens many people: young couples, drug dealers, elderly women tethered to oxygen tanks. Relentless insanity bubbles beneath his surface, rising violently only to recede again like the ocean tide.

New Orleans, through Herzog's lens, is similarly relentless, a near barren post-Katrina wasteland. We see the French Quarter from its edges, but we see the Lower 9th Ward in full view.

Cage's McDonagh is strangely mesmerizing, hunched over like Richard III and fueled by Vicodin and cocaine. Ironically, the bad lieutenant's bad habit is the result of a good deed. He injures his back while saving a jail inmate from drowning during Hurricane Katrina. Afterward, he must pop pills and snort lines merely to function.

"Bad Lieutenant," however, is not a brief against drug abuse, although it portrays it as anything but glamorous. McDonagh is a high-functioning addict. He juggles gambling debts, a high-class prostitute girlfriend (Eva Mendes), the mob, a drug lord (Alvin "Xzibit" Joiner) and a murder investigation involving a slain family. All, however, threaten to fall, and in so doing alert his fellow officers to his illegal doings.

Was McDonagh a bad cop before his injury and substance abuse? We do not know. Is he truly a bad cop afterward? By all legal and moral standards, yes. Yet he is still more ethical than his partner, played by Val Kilmer.

Herzog does not offer easy answers. What, after all, is the significance of the alligator and the iguanas who, shot on a shaky video camera by Herzog himself, appear as mute spectators to the proceedings? Are they merely McDonagh's hallucinations? Or do they hold greater significance?

And what are we to make of the dead man's soul, which McDonagh sees still dancing even after its corporeal home has been shot full of holes? Is it just another sign of his insanity?

In the end, perhaps there are no answers, merely a punch line, but a punch line well worth the telling. For Herzog and Cage, all is a dark comedy, and the joke is on humanity.

"Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call — New Orleans" is now available on DVD and Blu-ray.

Culture Shock 05.07.09: Finding madness at the bottom of the world

When Werner Herzog told the National Science Foundation he wanted to make a documentary in Antarctica, he warned them in advance. This was not going to be a heartwarming movie about marching penguins.

Nevertheless, the most arresting scene in "Encounters at the End of the World" does involve a penguin.

On a rocky outcropping at the bottom of the world, Herzog interviews a researcher who has spent so much time among the penguins that he barely speaks to humans. Desperate to get the researcher to talk, Herzog asks questions about penguin sex habits. The researcher seems skeptical about reports of gay penguins. Then Herzog asks if there is such a thing as madness among penguins. Do any penguins ever get so fed up with their colony that they simply go insane?

The researcher says he has never seen a penguin bashing its head against a rock, but sometimes penguins become disoriented and end up in places they shouldn't be.

Then, as if on cue, a penguin demonstrates the madness Herzog is seeking.

The lone penguin refuses to follow the others to the water to feed and refuses to return to the colony. After a few minutes, it finally turns and waddles toward the mountains, located far into the bleak, icy continent's interior. Herzog tells us that when a penguin sets out like this, nothing will stop it. It will press on until it meets its fate, which is certain death.

No marching penguins. No penguins with happy feet. It is this one penguin, which Herzog describes as "deranged," that captures Herzog's interest and, one suspects, his heart as well. If the famed German filmmaker has a soft spot for anything, it's suicidal madness. He's a romantic, albeit one with a dark outlook on life.

His earlier documentary, 2005's "Grizzly Man," covers similar terrain. Herzog tells the story of Timothy Treadwell, using, in part, Treadwell's own movie footage, left behind after his death in 2003. Treadwell's derangement, if you want to call it that, cost him his life.

Over the course of 13 summers, Treadwell, an environmentalist and activist, lived among the grizzly bears of Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska. He clashed frequently with the National Park Service, which cited him numerous times for reckless behavior. In 2003, Treadwell and his girlfriend were mauled to death and eaten by at least one bear.

Treadwell thought he was protecting the bears from humans, when in reality he needed protection from the bears. For Herzog, that is a kind of madness.

Unlike Treadwell, the scientists and support staff in "Encounters at the End of the World" are professionals with a regard for safety and a respect for the dangers the remote, untamed continent presents. Working near an active volcano or underwater beneath several feet of solid ice, they find those dangers impossible to ignore.

After seeing some of the small but monstrous predators that lurk in the Antarctic's waters, Herzog speculates that it must have been similar terrors that drove our ancestors millions of years ago to evolve to live on land. Fish evolved into amphibians and escaped the ferocious depths.

But for Herzog, that was only a temporary reprieve, and humanity's eventual end can't be prevented by combating climate change or embracing New Age, environmentalist philosophies. Herzog is nothing but dismissive of people he deems to be "tree huggers." He takes a longer view.

The vast majority of all of the species that have ever lived on Earth — more than 99 percent of them, in fact — are extinct. Those are pretty long odds against us not eventually going the way of the dinosaurs.

Yet, as depressing as this all sounds, there is something captivating about Herzog's fatalism. In spite of it all, he thinks people's hopes and dreams matter, and he is fascinated by the odd assortment of dreamers who come each summer to live in one of the world's most hostile environments — people, like that penguin, who just want to get away from it all, no matter the cost. If that is derangement, Herzog seems to sympathize.

"Encounters at the End of the World" is now available on DVD.