28 - Of Horses, Bison, and Albino Alligators

At first, Werner Herzog's 2010 film on the Chauvet Cave, "Cave of Forgotten Dreams," looks like a typical documentary. The cave, discovered in France in1994, is not open to the public – the carbon dioxide from the breath of millions of visitors would destroy it. So Herzog was allowed to film the cave's Paleolithic drawings to show them to the public worldwide. 

 

The cave contains the oldest drawings known to date. They are 32,000 years old, and prove that humans were already capable of producing very sophisticated art. So, we as a species weren't brutes who suddenly started a civilization 3,000 years ago.

Also, according to the French team, the main painter was a distinct individual, who put his/her hand-print next to the work as a kind of signature. They painted horses, bison, mammoth, showing the sheer joy of observing animals. There are no hunting scenes. 

 

The curator of the cave, Jean-Michel Geneste, makes the point that the act of painting can communicate across cultures even more than writing does; also, that film has the same function now that the cave's paintings, which seemed to imitate motion, had then.

So, what message is Herzog giving us, besides showing us nicely drawn art from Paleolithic people? Well, the film ends with a bizarre scene: only twenty miles from the paintings' site there is a nuclear power plant, and the hot water from its cooling system is used to create a tropical habitat, where tourists can see albino alligators.

 Since the German filmmaker is famous for his quasi-surrealistic work, I thought he was making it up. He wasn't, except for one fact: the albinos were not a mutation caused by radiation in France as he claimed; they were imported from the U.S. where the alligators had been thriving...in the waters used to cool Florida's nuclear plant. 

 

So, the supposedly environmentally conscious French are attracting tourists next to their nuclear plant, to see animals that have nothing to do with France. Let's hope there isn't another Chernobyl...or is that a tourist attraction too?

None of the movie reviewers could explain why Herzog put this scene in the film, nor his musings on what a mutant alligator would think of the cave art. I have a theory. The filmmaker is telling us that we still have part of our brain in common with reptiles. We are not completely evolved. That kind of brain is incapable of understanding that we can cause our own destruction.