Ordinarily, I don’t have a lot of interest in caves as such. Spelunking per se isn’t my thing ; rather I swoon when looking at Canadian Rocky Mountains or visiting our own very highlands such as Rocky Mountain National Park, where I can negotiate with small animals at 11,000 feet or more. Caverns get me going when there’s evidence of deep time human activity. An unusually excellent film available in 3-D Blu-Ray is Werner Herzog’s “The Cave of Forgotten Dreams” about the Chauvet caverns in south France. 35,000 years ago: footprints of a small human and a wolf, plus plenty, plenty of paintings, one or two NSFW and big; some with bear claw scratches made after the painting was done. I had the distinct pleasure of see this 3-D filmic gem five (5) times in a Greenwich Village theater. I went five distinct times. And emerged each time looking at the street traffic and buildings in amazement for an hour or so afterward. It’s as close to time travel as I’ve ever come, apart from visiting Minoan and later classical remains, and very powerful. Buy the DVD in any format you like; it’s worth it to get some perspective on our lives today.
|