2014 Top Ten List #4 A Dream of Iron (Cheol-ae-kum)

A DREAM OF IRON (Cheol-ae-kum)            A                         
S. Korea  (100 mi)  2014  ‘Scope  d:  Kelvin Kyung Kun Park

Originally conceived as a three-channel museum video art instillation, 철의 꿈 (鐵夢, A Dream of Iron), 3 Channel Installation - Vimeo (1:48), where three large projections run simultaneously in 30-minute loops, as shown at the Daegu Art Factory Survey Exhibition in March 2013, where there is no beginning and no end, as the viewer is free to move around the room and leave at any time, which, according to the director, represents a style of film more liberating than a feature film.  But this Korean manufacturing film develops into an intoxicating and impressionistic essay on massive, large-scale machinery that become an extension of man’s reach, as he is able to create machines that are so much bigger and stronger than anything he is capable of himself, where the colossal machines are reverently described as gods, as humans worship them on such a massive scale, becoming dependent on them to survive.  While the machines come to represent the hopes and dreams of the future, ushering in a more modern era, it also comes at a price, suggesting the spiritual domain, the inner sanctity of man has been sacrificed at the foot of the giant machines, where Park’s somber film style documents on a grand scale the rituals of an industrial age, becoming an immaculately beautiful requiem for the remnants of a dying age.  Featuring some of the most extraordinary cinematography by the director himself that literally takes one’s breath away, where viewing this on as large a screen as possible can reduce one to tears simply by the rapturous beauty of the film which takes on a sci-fi, post-apocalyptic tone, as if humans once lived in gargantuan steel cities ruled by machines.  Unlike the Wiseman film National Gallery (2014) which surprisingly doesn’t allow moments of introspection due to the constant explanations, this more wordless effort is fertile grounds for quiet contemplation.  The stunning power of the images has not been seen since the seemingly endless opening shot of Jennifer Baichwall’s MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES (2006), a slow tracking shot down a side aisle of a huge Chinese iron assembly plant of 23,000 workers, revealing endless rows of bright yellow-shirted factory workers sitting at their work stations performing a synchronized monotony of repetitious motions, many of whom seem relieved to stop and stare at the camera’s obvious intrusion, where the accumulation of ever-expanding space defies all known concepts of rationality.  These technological wastelands drive the nation’s economy but leave the workers doomed to indifference and solitude.

What Park does, however, is strive for the profound by magnifying the extraordinary beauty of size, where cinema has rarely concentrated on filming objects of this immense magnitude before without being seen at some distance, like the lift-off sequence of a space craft into outer space, or resorting to fictional movie recreations, capturing commanding images through a choreography of slow pans, obtaining views never before seen, where the viewer is literally immersed in an industrial aura of seemingly endless time and space.  Shot in the port city of Ulsan along Mipo Bay, home of one of the world’s largest shipyards, the director shoots at POSCO (Pohang Steel Company) and the Hyundai Shipyard, both playing a key role in the postwar economic development and industrialization of South Korea, where the company name “Hyundai” means “modernity,” playing into a myth that corporate industrialization has been at the forefront of a modern social movement since the 60’s, but the film documents many of the accompanying protests, including strikes by workers both in the 1970’s and again in the 1990’s protesting against the giant “Goliath crane,” where 78 workers actually occupied the crane, a prelude to many other “high altitude” battles to come, as these goliaths introduce new and unprecedented dangers into the work place, where welding at that altitude is particularly hazardous.  As a result, they try to build as much as they can on the ground and then hoist it to the elevated heights needed.  By photographing this amazing process, the director transforms this bleak industrial landscape into a poetic exploration of the sublime, where the power of the visual tableaux is awe-inspiring and ominous, creating an astonishing montage set to Mahler’s 1st Symphony, 3rd Movement, played by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Rafael Kubelík, A DREAM OF IRON Trailer | Festival 2014 YouTube (2:46), which is quite simply one of the most ravishingly beautiful sequences of cinema seen all year.  The slow precision of the camera movements are similar to Kubrick’s monumental outer space movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), where the human eye is simply captivated by what the future holds, while at the same time reveals a kind of unspoken mysticism from Tarkovsky’s messier, less sterile version of the future in SOLARIS (1972), where the symphonic imagery of steel in motion is also accompanied by age-old Buddhist monk spiritual chants, continually connecting the present to the past.

Originating with the silent film short Manhatta (1921), where the city of New York is reduced to an abstraction of images, which was followed by a similar treatment of Paris in Alberto Cavalcanti’s NOTHING BUT TIME (Rien que les heures, 1926), the 20’s was an era when experimental filmmakers began exploring the rapid growth in urban development, capturing the rhythm and motion in montage films known as “City Symphonies,” including Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (1927), André Sauvage's ÉTUDES SUR PARIS (1928), and Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera (1929).  In Park’s mind, the metal ships under construction remind him of the awe that was once associated with giant whales, depicted in the Neolithic wall drawings of the nearby Bangudae Petroglyphs, where over 200 images of animals and people are drawn onto the side of the Bangudae Mountain, dated somewhere between 3500 and 7000 years ago.  It was only after whales were conquered by humans and began being hunted and captured for commercial use that they lost their sense of epic grandeur, where they were once seen as near mythological creatures.  When seen in the ocean, they remain a colossal figure of undisputed nobility, where the sounds they make can sound musical, adding a sense of artistry and co-existence when heard interacting with the industrial images, where the film retains a religious sense of divine glorification.  Briefly interjected into this observational documentary is a personal, diary-like narration that suggests the narrator’s former girlfriend has just left him to seek enlightenment as a shaman, where she wishes to pursue a relationship with God.  In response, the director goes on a similar quest to seek out the remnants of new earthly gods, which offer their own sense of undefinable wonder.  Using a mix of electronic and acoustic music from Paulo Vivacqua, the effect can be strangely hypnotic, offering its own sense of sacred insight by connecting with another medium, where film can turn the abstract into something poetically comprehensible, imparting euphoric feelings of joy and reverence.  A style in contrast to J.P. Sniadecki’s The Iron Ministry (2014), where old-world iron horse style trains have been replaced by modernized bullet trains, this film examines every level of production, where we hear from one of the first female laborers as she puts on the various protective layers of uniform, covering every part of her body before she steps out to weld large metal pieces together, but we also see streams of workers arriving to work while another shift is leaving simultaneously, creating hordes of human congestion on the street as a traffic policeman stands on a pedestal directing traffic with a series if strange hand motions.  While individual workers are discretely isolated in their own space performing their assigned tasks, what’s most striking are the bold and terrifying images where constantly monitored computers are pouring enormous vats of hot, molten iron or lifting gigantic ship parts that only the massive “Goliath” cranes can hoist in the air, creating unforgettable, mind-boggling images that offer a sense of the sacred and the sublime.  

2001: A Space Odyssey

2001:  A SPACE ODYSSEY              A                    

USA  Great Britain  (148 mi)  1968  ‘Scope (70mm)  d:  Stanley Kubrick 

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

—T. S. Eliot

Somebody said man is the missing link between primitive apes and civilized human beings.  You might say that that is inherent in the story of 2001 too.  We are semi-civilized, capable of cooperation and affection, but needing some sort of transfiguration into a higher form of life.  Since the means to obliterate life on earth exists, it will take more than just careful planning and reasonable cooperation to avoid some eventual catastrophic event.  The problem exists as long as the potential exists; and the problem is essentially a moral one and a spiritual one.

Most astronomers and other scientists interested in the whole question are strongly convinced that the universe is crawling with life; much of it, since the numbers are so staggering, (is) equal to us in intelligence, or superior, simply because human intelligence has existed for so relatively short a period.

I tried to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophical content...I intended the film to be an intensely subjective experience that reaches the viewer at an inner level of consciousness, just as music does...You're free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film. 

—Stanley Kubrick

The debates about the ‘meaning’ of this film still go on. Surely the whole point of the film is that it is beyond meaning, that it takes its character to a place he is so incapable of understanding that a special room—sort of a hotel room—has to be prepared for him there, so that he will not go mad.

—Roger Ebert

This is perhaps the film that separates Kubrick from everyone else, as despite the fact it’s nearly half a century old, it will forever remain timeless, and remains the definite portrait of human contact with other extraterrestrial life forms, one that staggers the imagination with a sense of visual awe and wonder, while challenging the viewers to contemplate the idea of superior life forms in the universe, where things beyond our capabilities to comprehend are not only possible, but probable.  In seeking to unlock the secrets of the universe, in Kubrick’s hands it’s like challenging the existence of God, where we have to ask ourselves where do we come from?  Science offers probabilities and facts, and even enables humans to probe other planets in the same solar system, but there are galaxies outside our comprehension where we have little knowledge.  It’s not too far-fetched to imagine that there are complex and sophisticated life forces in the universe that preceded man’s evolution, that have far surpassed our knowledge, and Kubrick’s film, adapted from Arthur C. Clarke’s 1951 short story The Sentinel, imagines just such a confrontation.  Basically a meditation on extraterrestrial intervention and its influence on the process of human evolution, at least initially the focus is on the history of human evolution on earth, beginning in the Paleolithic Age of prehistory that existed before humans, when only animals roamed the earth, but began to develop “human” attributes, eventually evolving from the apes into a human life form.  Jumping ahead 4-million years in a single shot, man is venturing into space travel and planetary exploration, where again the focus is upon human technical accomplishments, perceived as mighty achievements, even as there are intimations of secret discoveries, such as an intentionally placed object buried on the moon by some other planetary life force that cannot be shared with the rest of the world as it cannot be scientifically explained, so scientists, and likely military advisors, are unable to determine if these discoveries are the act of friends or foe.  Eventually as the viewers are taken on this incredible space journey, we travel into distant galaxies we can’t possibly understand, that are far outside our realm of knowledge, where it can feel terrifying to completely lose one’s earthly bearings and find ourselves suddenly at the mercy of some “other” intergalactic realm, where collectively as a species we arrive just as helplessly as Blanche DuBois, one of Tennessee Williams’ most quintessential characters, who utters, “Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” 

This may be the most successful experimental film ever made, as there’s little about this film that suggests commercial possibilities, eternally slow and contemplative, mostly a nonverbal, intensely subjective experience offering little explanation, where there is no dialogue in the first 25 minutes of the movie, and none in the last 23 minutes, as what little narrative exists is almost entirely advanced through spectacular visual detail that penetrates the subconscious, where no one other than Kubrick could possibly have imagined making it exactly this way, yet this remains the highest grossing Kubrick picture he ever made, produced for little over $10 million dollars, yet globally earning about $200 million dollars.  This is a film that each generation will eventually discover and attempt to come to terms with, where it’s one of only a handful of Hollywood films that were meant to be projected in 70 mm, shot in a variety of formats from 8 mm (Cineavision, 2:35 anamorphic), 16 mm (flat version), Digital, and 35 mm, including one of first uses of a front projection camera in a feature film, preceded only by Ishirô Honda’s Japanese special effects film MATANGO (1963), blown up to Super Panavision 70, where it requires a special engineering installation to project the film properly.  Nonetheless, it remains to this day the mindblowing experience it was always meant to be, beginning with one of the most perfectly synchronized opening credit sequences ever created, 2001: A Space Odyssey Title Sequence - YouTube (1:39), set to the ominous music of Richard Strauss, the opening horn “Sunrise Fanfare” from Also Sprach Zarathustra, which plays as three celestial bodies move into perfect alignment.  This is followed by a lengthy, visually expressive but wordless opening sequence entitled The Dawn of Man, which precedes human evolution, showing rival groups of apes (mostly mimes and dancers in monkey suits hired to play apes) in contention for the same watering hole, that includes a mysterious appearance by a monolith, a black rectangular slab placed there by “other” space travelers apparently to observe and possibly influence the evolutionary progression of humanity, as it sparks the discovery of tools that could be used as weapons, and with it, violence and a struggle for power, representing the birth of consciousness, or perhaps the genesis of evil, where life forms are finally able to exercise the use of technology to challenge the natural order, turning ruthlessly deadly, leading to an altered power over nature, also set to exceptionally eerie, experimental choral music, the Dies Irae of György Ligeti’s Requiem, along with screeching apes, actually using the sounds of wild cats, gorillas, and chimpanzees originally recorded for the John Ford film MOGAMBO(1953), and a return of the “Sunrise Fanfare,” Dawn of Man - 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, S. Kubrick YouTube (2:47), beautifully linking man’s initial evolution to futuristic space travel in one of the most audacious edits in the history of film, achieved in a stunning cut from an ape hurling a bone into the air that becomes a spaceship, where the effect was finally achieved when Kubrick walked back to the studio tossing bones into the air and filming their flight with a handheld camera, with the underlying suggestion being that despite our complex technological advancements, humanity may still be in a state of infancy.  

Once in outer space, Kubrick creates a world of clean lines and intricate detail, where no sound can be heard aside from the film’s musical score, establishing a glacial pace with the stately music of Johann Strauss’s Blue Danube Waltz, 2001: A Space Odyssey-Strauss - YouTube (5:34), which has a near hypnotic clockwork precision, but also a feeling of weightlessness where one loses all sense of time.  One develops a feel for the incredible slowness and the repetition of boredom as time passes in what seems like an eternity, becoming synonymous with the unfathomable distances of space travel, filling the enormously huge distances of time and space, perfectly capturing the timeless quality that is the essence of the film.  While initially we just get a taste of space travel, resembling a kind of spacious, super first class accommodation that we might see on an ordinary airplane, but with weightlessness, where we still have the services of a stewardess, but also a visual telephone able to call earth.  While there are meetings and conferences suggesting something mysterious has been discovered on the moon, a second 4-million year old artifact buried deep on the lunar surface, a smaller-sized monolith intentionally left behind for someone to find it, sending a radio signal to one of the moons of Jupiter, as if providing a clue, where the spaceship Discovery is sent to investigate.  Into this equation Kubrick adds an element of uncertainty and comic relief through, of all things, the HAL 9000 computer, known for never having committed an error in its entire history, so it is given the task of controlling every aspect of the Jupiter-bound flight, where for eighteen months astronauts Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) travel to Jupiter along with a crew that is kept asleep in a state of hibernation until they near the planet.  Along the way, HAL identifies a malfunction, that when examined reveals nothing’s wrong, so there appears to be a human standoff against the superior technology of the computer, where the two astronauts meet in private to discuss the possibility of dismantling the computer, if need be, as they no longer trust its efficiency, as the computer’s explanation for its own inaccurate report is “It can only be attributable to human error.”  Kubrick makes sure the human dialogue throughout couldn’t be more deliberately banal, which of course raises questions about modern society’s dependence and over reliance upon technology, where breakdowns or the unexpected are never counted upon, as unlike the occasionally flawed human factor, computers are supposed to represent a Godlike perfection, a kind of utopian technological vision that can be counted upon.  The thought of them breaking down or making errors is unthinkable, yet this is the dilemma facing the two human astronauts aboard the spaceship Discovery, though they discount the computer’s ability to read lips when they discuss their options, a fatal mistake that leads to the intermission.  

No sooner does the audience return to their seats but HAL jettisons Frank, who is on an external inspection and repair, into the void of deep space.  The jolt of this vile act is initially difficult to process, where the viewer thinks there must be some kind of mistake.  But it’s Dave that must leave the safety of the ship to retrieve his dead comrade and return him to the ship, where HAL refuses admittance. 

Dave Bowman: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.

HAL: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.

Dave Bowman: What's the problem?

HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.

Dave Bowman: What are you talking about, HAL?

HAL: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.

Dave Bowman: I don't know what you're talking about, HAL.

HAL: I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen.

Dave Bowman: [feigning ignorance] Where the hell did you get that idea, HAL?

HAL: Dave, although you took very thorough precautions in the pod against my hearing you, I could see your lips move.

In the movie, HAL tries to kill Dave by keeping him out of Discovery after Dave retrieves Frank’s body.  In the book, Dave never tries to retrieve Frank’s body, and HAL tries to kill him by opening inside and outside airlock doors and letting all air escape.  In both cases, Dave survives by making it to an emergency airlock and turning on the oxygen, where he’s forced to dismantle the computer.  Theories abound about HAL as a representation of the new digital culture, a machine with artificial intelligence that is nearly human, a Frankenstein invention that veers out of control, where man is ultimately at the mercy of the machine.  HAL may have been programmed from the beginning to malfunction, as it’s conceivable he was programmed to malfunction so he could eliminate the crew in order to more perfectly carry out the mission, quickly killing the crew in hibernation, but due to his close interaction with the astronauts, he has difficulty concealing this information from them, as he knew how they would react, becoming more of a cautionary tale where Dave is forced to disconnect his higher brain functions.  Perhaps the most amusing scene in the entire film is when Dave does exactly that, where HAL tries to talk him out of it, “Look Dave, I can see you’re really upset about this.  I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.”  This is one of the few instances of a computer having a nervous breakdown, or a meltdown of catastrophic proportions for reasons that are never made explicit in the film, yet it’s HAL’s insecurity that may be the most human aspect of the film, perhaps Kubrick's most humorous character, played by the voice of Canadian actor Douglas Rain, yet he gains our sympathy when he pleads for his life, begging him to stop, “I’m afraid, Dave.  Dave, my mind is going.  I can feel it,” where his dismantling leads to a delirious soliloquy and a children’s song, Deactivation of Hal 9000 - YouTube (4:38).  Ironically, the sound of human breathing (Kubrick’s own recorded breathing) acts as a counterpoint to the machine’s lobotomy.  The last of the astronauts to survive, Bowman is finally on his own in the farthest reaches of the solar system, cut off from all earthly ties, suggesting an end of humanity as we know it before it is transformed anew.  Unlike many special effects movies, Kubrick was determined to make every effects shot look extremely realistic, using hand-drawn illustrations, frame by frame, of a space ship flying, also finely detailed miniature models of spacecraft where the attention to detail made it possible for the cameras to get as close as possible without losing believability.  Initially (also in the book) the Discovery was on a mission to Saturn, but when the special effects crew couldn’t come up with a convincing model of that planet, Kubrick changed it to Jupiter.  One of the crowning achievements of the film was the level of detail achieved a year before we actually set foot on the moon, where Kubrick hired a Scientific Consultant, Frederick Ordway, who collaborated with various corporations like Whirlpool, RCA, GE, IBM, Pan Am, and NASA, providing easily recognizable product placement in exchange for some of their futuristic ideas, where the familiarity of their logos adds another layer of realism to audiences.   

Of interest, the early drafts of the script included a narration, but the final version exclusively utilizes inner titles, where the most intriguing is the final title sequence, Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite.  Once Bowman ultimately reaches Jupiter, there is another encounter with the monolith, who seems to have been waiting for him, sweeping him into a force field, sucked into a star gate sequence that hurls him through the infinite on a psychedelic-rendered phantasmagorical journey into deep space, transporting him to another part of the galaxy, jettisoned through celestial starbursts and gaseous nebular regions, shot through colored filters, including aerial footage of Monument Valley, Utah and aerial shots originally made for Kubrick’s DR. STRANGELOVE (1964), designed by special photographic effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull, photographing drops of dye moving on a glass plate to create the strangely moving gaseous effects.  Kubrick also invented a split-scan effect by keeping the camera’s shutter open to expose a single frame of film while he moved the light source toward the camera to create fantastical light patterns.  Two musical pieces by Ligeti overlap, the Requiem and the orchestral work Atmospheres, which add an eerie intensification, making the abstract expressionist artwork the visual focal point of the film, a place where the spatial and temporal ambiguity meets the metaphysical and philosophical realms, where the viewer is literally plunged into the incomprehensible.  Making contact with an extraterrestrial life force that has progressed beyond anything we could imagine, their potential would be limitless and their intelligence ungraspable by humans.  To us they would appear as gods.  For Kubrick to simply speculate on the possibility of their existence is sufficiently overwhelming, where he doesn’t try to decipher their motives.  When the journey is over, Bowman arrives in a “white room,” also described as a Louis XVI room, bearing some resemblance to the artworks shown in PATHS OF GLORY (1957), something that resembles human perfection, where the only imperfection in the room is Bowman, who is fed and kept alive, eating his meals quietly, placed on display like a zoo creature in luxurious hotel room surroundings that would feel familiar to him, perhaps something discovered from his own dreams and imagination.  When his life has passed from middle to old age, the monolith returns to the foot of his bed and Bowman transcends into another dimension, reborn as a being of higher intelligence, a star child, where he’ll likely return to earth to help them leap forward into their evolutionary destiny.

The beauty of the film is this is simply one man’s vision, where the timeless aspect of the viewing experience is so subjective, the film remains open to multiple interpretations, which are likely to evolve over time as well.  While the film tinkers with narrative experimentation, it alters the way stories are told, where at the premier screening of the film, 241 people walked out of the theater, including Rock Hudson who remarked, “Will someone tell me what the hell this is about?”  Interestingly, the minimal use of story in a conventional sense allows the director to maximize visual sensation, where it was the psychedelic rendering in the final sequence that appealed to young viewers who eventually flocked to the film in droves, often enhanced by drugs or psychedelics, creating a mystical aura surrounding the film.  And while this is a late 60’s technological fantasy, a forerunner to exactly the kind of blockbuster, computer generated, science fiction films that could perfectly be described as cheap thrills, it is also an extension of DR. STRANGELOVE, in some ways a prophecy of things to come, where human fallibility is less likely to destroy mankind than the abdication of moral responsibilities to presumably infallible machines, like HAL, or the Fail-Safe nuclear response, where computers (and certainly the programming) have the capacity for error.  While the film alters the genre’s conventions about how the future will look, in this respect, Kubrick’s film may be the cinematic response to Fritz Lang’s visually exhilarating, pioneer silent sci-fi film METROPOLIS (1927), perhaps the summit of German Expressionism, interestingly set in the year 2000, with its wide range of elaborate special effects, dramatic camera angles, bold shadows, and futuristic set designs, where Roger Ebert noted that “Metropolis is one of the great achievements of the silent era, a work so audacious in its vision and so angry in its message that it is, if anything, more powerful today than when it was made.”  While much of the commentary about Kubrick’s film was about its minimal dialogue, the film is chock full of various means of communication via language, print, computer graphics, mathematical formulas, video and televised recordings, or words and graphs on a computer screen, much of it printed in the Helvetica typeface, all of which suggest a futuristic world where man is dominated and owned by technology, where they have adapted, becoming perfectly integrated into corporate terminology, even part of the circuitry, where there’s precious little human interaction.  Ultimately the film is a terrified celebration of technology and an elegy to the end of man, where the final sequences are perhaps the most provocative and ambiguous, revealing unresolved speculation on the origins and destiny of human life, expressed in extraordinarily visual starkness and serenity, leaving the viewer in a state of rapturous awe, caught in a rhapsodic wonder about heaven, earth, and the infinite beyond. 

Cave of Forgotten Dreams 3D

CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS 3D                    B-                   

USA  Canada  France  Germany  Great Britain  (90 mi)  2010  d:  Werner Herzog 

While the recent discovery in 1994 of these remarkable Chauvet caves in Southern France is a revelation, preserved in pristine condition due to a rockslide during the Ice Age which closed the cave opening, kept intact for 35,000 years, the use of a 3D camera to photograph them is more a stunt than a necessity, especially in the close ups of the oldest cave paintings on earth.  However, the innate claustrophobia of being enclosed in an underground cave and the accompanying uncomfortable nature of wearing 3D glasses, which produces a tunnel vision effect, as if the rest of the world is totally shut out, does seem to be a natural match.  Described by Herzog as “one of the great discoveries in the history of human culture,” denied access to the public and one that only a few scientists had ever been allowed to enter, the film is a gateway into our past, with perfectly preserved prehistoric charcoal drawings on the walls, the earliest known example of human art, where the quality is so high that it appears they were drawn yesterday.  Shot at a distance, especially through the narrow openings into another cave corridor, the contrasting fields of vision are spectacular, especially seen through illuminated stalagmites that sparkle in the light.  But the crawl space is so limited that most shots of the art on the walls are from extreme close range, where the 3D has no effect whatsoever.  Herzog attempts to suggest the 3D offers the illusion of movement, as if the pictures themselves don’t already contain that capacity.  The film however, filled with the points of view of various scientists, does inherently feel like an educational project, so in that respect, Herzog suggests he’s simply advancing the science of the possible uses of 3D.     

The gorge river area surrounding the cave is utterly gorgeous, where scientists discovered the cave by closely examining the unusual rock formations in the vicinity searching for signs of unusual air drafts, which suggest the presence of a cave.  The wall drawings are twice as old as any previous findings of human art in existence, yet these are the best preserved anywhere on earth.  A nearby cave was open to the public, but had to shut down when human breath was determined to be the cause for mold growing on the cave walls.  As a result, there is a single door entrance which opens and shuts like a bank vault, with restrictions on allowed time, levels of light, where one can not veer off a constructed metal walkway.  In truth, one does not need to spend excessive time in the restrictive confines of caves, as after awhile, like being stuck in a submarine, getting out feels like a relief.  The one problematic element of the film, which is likely purely subjective, is Herzog’s choice of music, which is usually nothing short of superb.  Drawing upon the music of a longtime collaborator, Dutch cellist and composer Ernst Reijseger, Herzog attempts to blend the ancient past with the future, using what might be termed serial music, a combination of atmospheric, atonal cello music that adds the soprano voice occasionally in an overly atmospheric sound, something others might call mood music.  Used successfully in previous films, such as THE WHITE DIAMOND (2004) and especially in THE WILD BLUE YONDER (2005), the music provides an otherworldly sound which perfectly matches the onscreen subject matter.  But here, the oldest known example of human art on the planet is not in any way enhanced by music that eventually feels irritatingly repetitive, not nearly original enough to capture the unique nature of what’s seen onscreen.   

Shot by Peter Zeitlinger, who has worked with Herzog since LITTLE DIETER NEEDS TO FLY (1998), and with Ulrich Seidl before that on some astounding Austrian documentaries, there is no question he brings a level of artistry into the project, especially considering the restrictions on distance to some of the drawings as well as the allowed levels of light.  The viewer gets an exquisite view of what’s inside this startlingly unique cave, but Herzog may go overboard in his attempts to explain his findings, as all the commentators are academics who speak in a dry professional vernacular.  Only one amusingly confesses he once worked in the circus, but other than that, they offer little personality to speak of.  The perfumist brought in to hunt for signs of an interior cave smell in the nearby rocks was admittedly off-beat, as was the man dressed in caveman clothing, or the guy playing “The Star Spangled Banner” on a fossilized flute, but they were more clownish than believable.  Herzog offers a few choice zingers of melodramatic overreach in his narration, but otherwise this feels more like a Visitor’s Center lecture than a film, where Herzog and his colleagues are so immersed into the pertinent scientific aspects that they forget how to humanize the subject matter with a more interesting presentation.  When Herzog adds a postscript, which includes the close proximity of a large nuclear power plant, which uses its runoff steam and water to power a greenhouse full of tropical plants and albino alligators, suggesting a public theme park using a replica of the Chauvet caves will soon be built nearby, it borders on the ridiculous.  All of which suggests the visualization is excellent, but the accompanying music and narration, usually Herzog’s strong points, remain out of balance and are among his weakest in years, which sadly undermine the power of the discovery.