Werner Herzog Goes Caveman: "Cave of Forgotten Dreams"

So I caught Werner Herzog’s new documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, at a theater in St. Louis today, and it’s one of the best docs I’ve seen in a while. It’s all about his visit to the Chauvet cave in southern France, with Paleolithic art dating to 32,000 B.P.E., in 3D to boot. (I’m not a great fan of 3D, find it mildly annoying at times, impressive now and then.) The cave art isamazing, lots of charcoal rhinos, lions, horses, bison, mammoth, and cave bears. Cave bear skulls covered in stalactites/stalagmites, cave bear footprints alongside human footprints, and even torch fragments dating to 28,000 B.P.E. Herzog always does a great voiceover. He’s like the voice of a bemused god. The horse figures are fantastic. One of the coolest images—among too many to mention, you have to see the film—is a Great Horned Owl figure scraped into the side of the cave wall. I love owls and in our mountain home we’ve identified seven different species, including one day when we watched a Goshawk and a Great Horned Owl eat and fight over a Snowshoe Hare.