Herzog's Cave: On Cinema's Unclaimed Pasts and Forgotten Futures

Abstract

This essay discusses Werner Herzog's 2010 3D film Cave of Forgotten Dreams as an effort to read (media) history against the grain so as to bring cinema's historically suppressed potentiality to life again. What the author calls Herzog's Cave Cinema is dedicated to expanding display and moving image culture and thus enables viewers to encounter their present, not as a rapid succession of highly fragmented images but as a meeting ground for contingent meanings and layered durations. As it reframes some of the oldest expressions of humankind, Cave Cinema asks us to rework our bodily relation to the (filmic) world and its temporality, decelerate our perceptual processes, and precisely in this way opens a window to the future as a site of potentiality.

Keywords:

• cave art
• film theory
• Werner Herzog
• media archaeology
• 3D cinema

Notes

Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, “Introduction: An Archaeology of Media Archaeology,” Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, eds. Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 3.

For an early exploration of this topic on Herzog's work, see Eric Rentschler, “The Politics of Vision: Herzog's Heart of Glass,” The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History, ed. Timothy Corrigan (London: Methuen, 1987), 159–181.

Brad Prager, The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth (London: Wallflower Press, 2007).

For a good overview and preliminary summary of various explorations and research activities, see Jean-Marie Chauvet, Elitette Brunel Deschamps, and Christian Hillaire, Dawn of Art: The Chauvet Cave (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996); and Jean Clottes, Chauvet Cave: The Art of the Earliest Times (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2003).

For different overviews of what inspired early cave art and whether we should consider it as art in the first place, see, among many other examples, Max Raphael, Prehistoric Cave Paintings, trans. Norbert Guterman (New York: Pantheon Books, 1946); Ellen Dissanayake, Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995); Jean Clottes, Cave Art (London: Phaidon, 2008); David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002); and David S. Whitley, Cave Paintings and the Human Spirit: The Origin of Creativity and Belief (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2009).

Jean-Louis Baudry, “Cinema: effets ideologiques produits par l’appareil de base,” Cinétique 7/8 (1970): 1–8.

Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses (New York: Routledge, 2010), 68.

Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave 214.

Laura U. Marks, The Skin of Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 125.

For more on the term of expanded cinema, see A. L. Rees, Duncan White, Steven Ball, and David Curtis, Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film (London: Tate, 2011).

Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave 225.

Ibid., 226.

Lutz Koepnick, “Archetypik der Gefühle: Werner Herzog und die Oper,” Lektionen in Herzog: Neues über Deutschlands verlorenen Filmautor Werner Herzog und sein Werk, ed. Chris Wahl (Munich: Edition Text und Kritik, 2011), 234–259.

Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 66–94.

Miriam Bratu Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 19.

Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 30.

W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 98.

Ibid., 27.