Creative Differences, History Films, Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication,
Werner Herzog, Dominique Baffier, Jean Clottes, Jean-Michel Geneste, Carole Fritz, Gilles Tosello, Michel Philippe, Julien Monney, Nicholas Conard, Charles Fathy
Back in 1994 a group of scientists discovered a cave in the South of France. To their amazement, the cave was full of ancient art work from the prehistoric ages. The cave was named Chauvet Cave, after the one who discovered it, and was immediately closed off to the public due to the historic significance of some of the oldest drawings known to man. Documentary filmmaker Werner Herzog was granted access with a small crew of handheld cameras for one hour to the cave to film a documentary. There are raised walkways, and they were required to stay on the walkway at all times, and not to touch anything. The result is this film of some of the most complex and intriguing art work of prehistoric man.
As you probably know, I often check out documentary films. I am interested in many of the things we can learn from these types of films. This one is certainly unique. With drawings as old as 32,000 years ago in a perfectly preserved state, they are able to build a bridge to ancient times, and learn a lot about the people back then. This part of the film is very fascinating, and very interesting. Unfortunately, they only had one hour access to the cave, so they filled this documentary up with a lot of fluff that is simply not very interesting. Interview after interview of things that are repetitive, and a lot that really doesn’t have much to do with the subject. If this film was a 45 minute production, it might have been wonderful, but with all the filler to make this film longer, it’s really causes you to lose interest after a while. As time goes by, it gets so boring, it’s hard to take. It’s sad, really, that the documentary is so poorly done. It may be that because it’s European, we American folk just don’t get it, as documentaries here may be somewhat different, but though very interested through the first 30 minutes or so, I really got bored to tears and it dragged on and on. Fortunately, it’s available on “Watch Instantly” on NetFlix and you can feel free to skim through the parts that get very dull. I can’t heartily endorse this film, but parts of it are very interesting.
EdG – EdsReview Dot Com – A Movie Review Blog
