![]() Herzog describes the cave as ‘the greatest discovery in human culture’, seeing the careful siting of the images and masterful use of the surfaces in their interplay with lines and light and shadow as ‘proto cinema’, beyond the static in the subtlety of their fluid movement.įor Berger, the cave manifests the human relationship with other species. In both films the narrations are quiet, almost reverential in the total silence of that immense and eerie space of glittering calcite, of stalactites and folded rock. ![]() Among the latter were John Berger and Werner Herzog, both of whom made films of their visits: Berger’s Dans le silence de la grotte Chauvet and Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams. The high levels of radon and the carbon dioxide inside the Chauvet Caves, which may have induced hallucinatory states of mind in the painters, make them unsafe to be in for more than brief periods and only very limited access is given to archaeologists, scientists and artists. What they found there is still considered to be a supreme aesthetic achievement of early art – 400 depictions of lions, horses, reindeer, musk oxen, rhinos, bears, ibex, bison, panther, aurochs and one small, engraved long-eared owl turning her head in the 270-degree rotation common to fixed-eyed, bendy-necked owls everywhere. ![]() In 1994, three French speleologists, investigating a draught blowing from a cleft in a rock at Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc in the Ardèche, cleared their way into a cave entrance concealed by a rock fall for 25,000 years. ![]()
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