A Tale of Two Movies (Part 1)

One of the definite joys of retirement is having the time to pursue whatever quirky topic comes across my path. To that end, as soon as I retired, I eagerly signed up with the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, run through Temple University, to take some classes. The offerings were many, with subjects ranging from Chinese Literature, through Modern Britain: Empire, War, Rock and Roll to Medieval Art from Timbuktu through Paris. I was, to put it mildly, like the preverbal kid in a candy shop.  

I ended up signing up for three courses, including Prehistory Today: Cave Art and Beyond. I had an interest in this course mainly because of a remarkable film I had seen a few years back, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, directed by Werner Herzog, about the exploration of the cave paintings in the Chauvet cave of Southern France. As I will explain further below, it was one of the most stunning movies that I have ever seen, and remained firmly implanted in my mind. It also, as I found out, altered forever my ability to watch other movies on the same topic. 

Our first assignment in the Cave Art class (yes, there can be assignments in lifelong learning classes) was to watch a film called Finding Altamira. It is a dramatization of the discovery of the first cave paintings in Europe. It is an interesting story, which was, from what I can tell,  fairly depicted in the film. 

The Altamira cave paintings were discovered and publicized by an amateur paleontologist, Don Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola (gotta love those Spanish names). The trouble was that if these cave paintings were what they seemed to be it meant a lot of people had been very wrong in what they had been saying about the origins of humans and their development. The Church, still reeling from the recent publication of Darwin’s Origin of the Species, could not accept proof of human activity that long predated its calculations of the age of earth based on biblical interpretation. For the professional paleontologists to accept the find was to admit that their theories of pre-historic humans had all been wrong.  

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Sautuola was, to put it mildly, vilified. The Church labeled him a heretic, who was not fit to raise a child. The professional paleontologists went even further. They called Sautuola a fraud, who had concocted the paintings to take recognition from the real scientists. He was summarily dismissed and disregarded, and the cave sealed up (and they say the cancel culture is something new). 

Of course, the story doesn’t end there. Over the next 20 years other cave paintings were found, mainly in southern France, that could not be disputed (i.e., found by professionals). Sautuola’s find was reconsidered and accepted by the scientific community. Émile Cartailhac, who had been one of Sautuola’s leading critics, admitted his mistake in doubting the find by publishing an article, “Mea culpa d’un sceptique” (I know, more French, but it sounds so much better than the translation), in a leading Anthropology journal. By then Sautuola was dead, but at least his reputation was restored, which made his family happy (or so the movie suggests). 

Cave of Forgotten Dreams is something else entirely. It’s a documentary chronicling the investigation the Chauvet cave, which had only been discovered in 1994. The paintings in this cave are some of the oldest discovered, estimated at approximately 35,000 years old. They are also some of the most beautiful and intricate.   

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The film’s depiction of the cave paintings is stunning. I was lucky enough to see it at the Ambler Theater (oh, how I miss movie theaters). It was shot in 3D which made these ancient paintings jump off the screen. Through much of the movie I held my breath as these incredible depictions of horses, mammoths, cave lions and other animals leapt out at me, as moving and as magnificent as anything I have ever seen. To me, these paintings are as relevant as any hung in the Louvre, or elsewhere. 

But there is another aspect of Cave of Forgotten Dreams that really stuck with me. We are so used to hearing of filmmakers being given full access to whatever they want to depict, whether it’s on the battlefield (embedded in Iraq) of in dissecting someone’s life (check out Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck). Herzog had anything but. Those studying the Chauvet cave designated a 2-foot-wide pathway through the cave that Herzog had to maintain while filming. He as only allowed three people with him in the cave. The cameras had to be custom-built for the shoot, and he could only use lights that gave off no excess heat. And, of course, the crew could NOT touch the cave wall or floor. Frankly, these limitations make the final movie that much more amazing.  

Scientists had learned the need for these precautions the hard way. Cave art had been a 20^th Century tourist attraction and the results were not good. Lascaux is perhaps the most famous cave ever found and it became one of the most visited, with up to 1,200 people going through the cave each day when it was open. The result was the formation of lichens, fungus and mold that threatened the very paintings people wanted to see.  

That was not going to happen at Chauvet. There was no public access to this cave!!!! In fact, even the number of scientists would be severely limited, and the cave was eventually shut off to all comers. The film is just as meticulous in documenting the efforts to preserve the Chauvet cave paintings, as it is in depicting them. 

So, how did Cave of Forgotten Dreams impact my watching of Finding Altamira? Let’s just say that the cave at Altamira was not treated as gingerly as the cave at Chauvet. I guess you really couldn’t blame Sautuola. No one had seen anything like this before. Still, I did not handle it well. 

There is a scene shortly after the paintings were found where Sautuola’s daughter and a local painter that Sautuola had engaged to assess the paintings go into the cave and begin to replicate the paintings on the cave walls. I was screaming, “With are you doing? Are you out of your f%*#ing minds??????”. Not surprisingly these freshly painted copies strengthened the claim that all the paintings were fraudulent.  

Even worse was the climactic scene where Sautuola’s wife finally agrees to go into the cave after avoiding it because of the objections of the Church. This is meant to be a moving scene of reconciliation between husband and wife, but it lost all impact for me when the first thing she does is put her hand on the wall to measure her hand size against the hand prints there, while Sautuola looked placidly on. I started yelling “Are you out of your mind? Get your grubby, filthy mitts off the paintings, you idiot”. I am sure that my family thought I was watching a football game (“You’re a bum de Sautuola!!! You want to play with the big boys??? They shouldn’t even let you do Junior High Science Projects!!!”) 

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Once my blood pressure got back to normal, I had to ask myself, what was that all about? I realized that my infatuation with Cave of Forgotten Dreams had made it impossible for me to tolerate the character’s behavior in Finding Altamira, even though I knew: 1. it was only a dramatization, not actual events; and 2. even if it was how it happened Sautuola, et al. had no way of really knowing what they had or how delicate the cave paintings were.  

The more I thought about my over-reaction the further I went down the rabbit-hole of examining my response. It dawned on me how many things that I had previously glossed over now really bothered me because of what I had subsequently encountered. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that cave paintings were just the tip of the iceberg.    

I want to explore this further, and better understand how the person I am today differs from who I used to be, and why. However, I have gone on too long here and so will pursue that in my next post (I can feel the waves of anticipation flowing through the internet). Till next time.