Abstract
This essay considers how Werner Herzog’s 3D documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2011) presents the entanglement of human drawing with natural formations of rock in a place where beauty is repeatedly ascribed to both these elements – the spectacular Chauvet Cave in the Ardèche gorge in France. The accumulated marks of activity, both human and geological, are presented in the film through aesthetics of layering associated with ideas of deep time. This concept, in the simplest sense, designates geologic time, mapped out for human understanding by the stratification and transformation of matter. The primary fascination of Chauvet lies in the dazzling cave paintings discovered there in 1994, some of which have been dated at 32,000 years old. Yet even this length of time is barely a scratch in the wider span of earth time, which renders any distinction between ‘prehistory’ and ‘history’, or between the definition of ‘art’ and that...
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