Watch Cave of Forgotten Dreams For Free

To me, this movie is perfection.

Memorable, crazy movie

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

A film that should touch the human in everybody. Werner Herzog's documentary "Cave of Forgotten dreams" brings images to the world, that have not been seen for over 20,000 years. This masterpiece in film takes us to view the oldest known pictorial works of art in human history some dating back as far as 32,000 years old. The artwork mainly consists of Horses, Lions and Bison of the time. Situated in a France, the "Chauvet caves" where discovered in 1994, up until that time the caves had been sealed completely by a rock fall and its contents locked in time. Herzog guides us poetically through the cave introducing us to the artwork made by humans of the upper Paleolithic era, offering interpretations from himself and eccentric experts. They include an archaeologist, a master perfumer and an anthropologist. Each of them puts in their own ideas and element of madness, coerced out by Herzog's peculiar questions. Often Herzog goes off track in his interviews and asks questions that would not normally spring to mind. This approach to telling the story purifies the concepts Herzog is trying to put across, Ideas of "The beginning of the human soul" and emotions and dreams of the ancient humans. This only magnifies the amazing and quite stunning story of the cave. Throughout the film Herzog perpetually looks for the human in all of his Interviewee's in an attempt to connect them to the human's of the past. I find the greatest achievement of the film is the bridge built by Herzog to the humans of the cave; he somehow restores a link over such an abyss of time that is truly remarkable. His poetic soliloquies require no further comment, only amazement and acknowledgment of the ideas he plants in your brain that grow if you let them. After the film I was left completely stunned at this beautiful delve into an ancient world and somehow I felt a strange empathy towards the humans of the time. The camera work and look of the film is gorgeous although within the cave Herzog is limited in his equipment and allowed only a few LED lights. Yet he manages to play with the shadows and textures of the paintings with light, enriching the visuals and creating movement. He try's to mentally take us to the cave and imagine the artists standing there, admiring their work by the light of fire's, as their paintings flicker, shift and move like real animals. Time and time again throughout the film you are left in state of awe, this film goes above and beyond the requirements of documenting; it reaches the heights of being culturally significant to the human community. An original music score was written for the film, it has a haunting quality. It plays mostly over images of the artwork, complimenting the camera work as the camera moves right as the animals face left. The illusion of movement is created with the lights and the music is appropriately titled "Shadow". This sequence in the film is so deep and raw with emotion, the animals really do appear real, as if in packs and out hunting. Herzog then explores outside the cave, introducing us to a Paleolithic flute made from ivory. A rather enthusiastic and possibly mad "experimental" archaeologist plays "star spangled banner" with the limited notes on the flute. This is yet again Herzog building a relationship between us and these wonderful humans of the past. Is he perhaps implying that 30,000 years ago, a man may have played that tune out of the flute, unaware of what that song would go on to represent? Or did it perhaps mean something then? There are few negatives that can be drawn from the film, and also for Herzog. Perhaps his fabrication of the lives of the ancient humans may be of an annoyance to the less poetically inclined, who want for concrete facts and no creative speculation. I find his style and vision faultless, if facts are what you are after then there are textbooks with them. Herzog provides so much more, that the only negative that can be cast upon him, will simply be a dislike to his film making in general. I will conclude as Herzog did exploring the ideas of humanness. I found this a very touching point to end the film on. His interviewee talks about the ideas that man has to communicate his surroundings, from the animals to the landscapes and humans themselves, there seams to be this urge to paint it, draw it or film it. Suggesting that visuals serve as a far greater articulation of human spirit than forms of oral language. Herzog suggests that this cave was possibly the start of such a communication with the future. A thought I had after the film was, what if the Humans of the cave could view this film, and how would they react to the wonder and amazement to their work? Would Herzog's interviewee's hypotheses come true, that these humans where trying to communicate their world to the future? It is perhaps that, but the real beauty in Herzog's outstanding film is that it will stand as a testament for humans of this civilisation to the humans of the next, it will tell of our fascination with Art, History and our fellow man.

The music becomes grating and overbearing as does Herzog's voice which is way paste its sell date but he is too in love with his own voice to hear that. What a waste of an opportunity. Get rid of the "scientists". Why are they in the cave getting in the way of filming the subject matter? They have to be there this one hour the are allowed to film? I wanted to experience the paintings with light approximating the moving torches that the cave painters carried. Instead we get all these concentrated bright spots from flashlight like head lamps from all these annoying scientists ruining every shot. i watched this in 2D. Someone should have told Herzog that if he had just properly and sparingly used the lights that he had we could have gotten an adequate sense of the 3 D of the cave walls from the shadows, as the film fleetingly does, if the light had moved consistently with the camera. He needed a real cinematographer with some brains and visualization ability like the cave painters had 30,000 years ago. As is all too typical, even for Victorian era architecture and furnishings, claimed in the name of science or preservation, but really to boost their importance, people with degrees always want to exclude others without the same degree from seeing things they are preserving. Why did the curator need to be there breathing on everything? Was this a condition of permission to film. She could have explained what we were seeing in voice over later and yielded her breathing damage time to the film crew but she wanted her face in the film. I thought having a boom mic operator was a waste too as was stopping the filming for a room tone type audio recording. This seem to be filmed and lit without any imagination or planning as if it was just any ol' location. Obviously the play of darkness and light coming only from moving torches influenced the way the animals were depicted. Even the scientists present, literally, and some in the future could have learned something from this if it had been lit and filmed to reproduce the way it was experienced by the cave painters.I'll take Herzog at his work that filming access may never be granted again and give him 1 star for squandering the privilege and preventing someone more capable from doing it. As a doc filmmaker over 60 I also feel embarrassed at the thought of being associated with him for that. He needs to retire now.

This film has excellent photography, especially considering the technical challenges. The evocative title ("Cave of Forgotten Dreams") is inspired, and well reflected throughout. A haunting theme. It's a beautifully decorated cave (quite aside from the prehistoric art). However, the editing is not good; there's a lot of redundancy, odd sequencing, and too long overall. And some of the dialog is rather hokey.I also had a hard time figuring out exactly where the cave is, even after looking it up on the 'net (finally succeeded using its GPS coordinates). It's another editing defect, I think. M. Herzog should have thrown in a minute or two of orientation at the beginning.Anyway, I was more familiar with some of the other splendid cave art sites (Lascaux, Altamira), but Chauvet appears to be the greatest of all. It's a more recent find, which is why I was ignorant. I'm grateful to the film for its beauty and educational value.

Why Herzog deemed it prudent to film this in 3D is something of a mystery. One supposes he wanted to try and make the paintings, not on flat surfaces, come alive, and maybe they do, in 3D, but in 2D it does nothing. Worse, this film really does nothing. There is nothing essentially Herzogian in it. It's a documentary any filmmaker could do for a cable channel, save for the pointless Postscript to the film, involving albino alligators and mystic mumbo jumbo Herzog finds profound.The film, at 89 minutes, is probably an hour too long, and while interesting cinematography, by Peter Zeitlinger,, and a nice soundtrack by Ernst Reijseger, enliven the film, they can only do so much. Herzog's narration is not what it is in earlier documentaries of high quality, and one sense the filmmaker gets bored with it all about halfway through the film. Nonetheless, it's a tossup as to which of the two documentaries, here under review is worse. This one is not good, but not bad, merely dull.