The Last Movie I Saw

I've mentioned in this blog before that I have never seen a good 3D movie, but that has changed. I went the other evening to see The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, a documentary by Werner Herzog, and for once the "advanced" technology actually added something to the experience. The film discusses the discovery of animal paintings found inside a cave whose entrance had been lost due to a rock slide (which also helped to seal and preserve the images), possibly thousands of years ago. The paintings themselves are believed to be something like 30,000 years old, making them by far the oldest extant pieces of art available to contemporary viewers (though access to the cave itself is severely limited-- the film crew was only let in for a handful of hours to make their movie). The theme explored by Herzog revolves around the impulse to define one's world and express its most critical components in both a celebratory and analytical way, and in so doing create bonds that stretch over time. The archaeologists and scientists who have worked on the paintings talk of how the images have transcended their antiquity to shape their own contemporary perspectives and even their dreams, signaling the immense power of art to bridge the gaps between people who couldn't be more different. The use of 3D helps in this regard by giving the viewer a greater sense of the physical context for the paintings (which adds the "voice" of nature to the dialogue) as well as a better sense of their relationships to one another. It's an incredibly compelling, thoughtful film-- one that had me thinking about its ideas for several days after seeing it, even to the point of wondering what signs we'll be leaving behind that may be equally intriguing to our descendants tens of thousands of years from now.