It’s about Time
Friends recently were raving about a 3D film they saw at the Louisiana Film Festival called Cave of Forgotten Dreams where filmmaker Werner Herzog went with a group of scientist who discovered the cave paintings in Chauvet, France, that are 32,000 years old. At one point, they discover a painting that is on top of the paintings done 1,000 years later.
I was thinking of my middle age spread as I watched three young women walking across the park this morning. They were in their mid twenties and had Venus shapes while I am fighting the loss of my Venus and the onset of the full moon look. I’m 52 years old, a mere spec in the time frame of nearly 6000 years on the Jewish calendar and to think that in one place some artist painted a rock and a thousand years later some other artist painted the same rock is a little mind blowing.
If I’m dealing with time in my own metaphysical sense, what is time in its enormity telling any of us?
Today, leaving the gym I saw the Louisiana Citizens Disaster and Evacuation Preparedness pamphlets – oh yeah, that time again – Hurricane Season begins on June 1st but right now the news has been on tsunamis, tornados, rising rivers, and earthquakes. Is this cycle of weather we are going through the Rapture, it is an “era” as in the Pleistocene, now that we are keeping records outside of caves, will people 1000 years from now know of our existence if all of our data is in the cloud?
May 27th, 2011 at 1:07 am
I saw the film last weekend, and walked out after an hour, leaving the other 9 in my group to suffer through it. Is it a fascinating subject? Yes. Is it enough material for a 2 hr film? No. At best it’s a 60 Minutes segment. There is a whole segment on the earliest known carving of Venus de Milo – and honestly it had zero to do with the drawings in the cave. Although it did raise an interesting question of why women were so round back then in a world before carbs and sugar, 40,000 years ago. Seriously, I would like to know the answer to that one.
A more interesting Herzog film is the one he made a few years ago in Antarctica. I don’t like how Herzog continually injects himself into the film, literally putting words into the mouths of the people he is interviewing. But the Antarctica – I think it’s Journey to the End of the World – showcases how the place attracts people who are really brilliant and functional but outside the norm. An average Joe couldn’t survive down there.
My unsolicited suggestion is Rent the Antarctica film, forget about the Caves movie.
May 27th, 2011 at 8:12 am
Good, I’ll take your vote on it – sometimes the notion of a piece is better than the piece itself, and maybe that is the case here.