Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Seriously, is there anything more ridiculous than a 3-D movie? Oh, brave new world, with such headaches in it—or to borrow an apt line from the Gang of Four, referring to a different coercion of the senses, “This heaven gives me migraine.” Yes, 3-D is impressive, it’s spectacular, it’s astounding, and I don’t give a shit. As a sensory assault, movies like Transformers are already a metaphorical punch to the face. Must we make it literal as well?

Being a devout technophobe and burgeoning curmudgeon, I’ve avoided 3-D filmmaking for as long as possible. In my imagination, it is not some fantastic spectacle, but rather something more like an oversized shoebox diorama where the drawings move. Too bad the bastards have discovered my weakness for Werner Herzog’s ecstatic, pseudo-mystic documentary reveries. Michael Bay better stay the hell away from my eyeballs, but I’ll at least let that Teutonic weirdo take a crack at them.

This is my way of offering a disclaimer. Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Herzog’s much-heralded documentary excursion into 3-D, is my first experience with the technology. Does it compare to Avatar, the supposed benchmark of the form? Does it even matter? Herzog is such a sui generis filmmaker that comparing him to others is futile. He’s always existed somewhere on his own personal plane of reality. What’s one more dimension at this point?

The endearing eccentricity that has turned him into a cult figurehead of late is still on display here, albeit muted. Perhaps that is due to the constraints of the filming. Given a rare opportunity to film Chauvet Cave in France, Herzog was working under tight restrictions: a small crew (himself and three others), a few battery-powered lights, jury-rigged cameras, and only a few hours a day to film, spread out over six days. Herzog narrates and interviews, throwing in the usual mystical ruminations and digressions, but he gives much of the film over to the cave’s most stunning feature: the breathtaking 32,000-year-old paintings that cover the walls.

Depicting numerous animals—from horses to rhinos and extinct creatures like cave lions and mammoths—the paintings offer a tantalizing glimpse into the Paleolithic past. Only one human figure appears, that being the bottom half of a fertility goddess. But it is the animals that rule this cave, with their calcified skeletons lying beneath the vivid portraits that depict them in full vigour. Their mouths are open, braying and howling and panting, while the ancient painters draw multiple legs to suggest movement. The walls are scraped white, resembling the bones of some giant beast. Someone says it feels like the cave watches you. No kidding.

Now 3-D might sound like a perverse choice for a documentary dedicated to filming cave paintings, but it proves to be an inspired touch. The cave walls do not offer a level canvas. They are sheets of stone billowed by time, sometimes sharp and sometimes round but never even. The 3-D captures that fluid surface, offering a distinct and subtle sense of the way the paintings occupy space. These are not flat drawings, and cannot be filmed as such.

Who would have thought there could be subtlety to 3-D? If ever there was a film technology built in defiance of nuance, this is it. Even Herzog cannot avoid all the expected gaudiness of 3-D, what with the occasional spear or stalactite jabbing the viewer in the eye. He even has a bit of fun with the technology at one point, staging a first-person shot so that it appears hands are taking off our glasses (ha ha, good one, Werner). But the cave drawings, thankfully, do not jump off the screen. They seem to writhe on the cave walls, riding the contours of the cave as they would the hills of a landscape. If this technology lets us feel as if we could reach out and touch the screen, then these paintings remain hauntingly beyond our grasp.

Amusingly, 3-D may not even be enough for Herzog. In one of those touches that could only be called Herzogian, he pauses to film the silence of the cave, allowing us to take in the drips of water, that ominous slight whooshing noise—in short, a sense of a place that can, and for centuries did, exist without a human presence. And in another oddball choice, he invites a master perfumer into the cave to smell the air. Was smell-o-vision ever on the table as a possibility?

Never one to pass up an impossible quest, Herzog has found a grand one here: attempting to comprehend human minds some 30,000 years dead. It is, as he notes, much like trying to understand the hopes and dreams of everyone in New York using only the phonebook. Far removed from our ancient ancestors, we’re mutants from the future staring into the past, trying in vain to see a reflection of ourselves. And fittingly enough, we have our own mutant form of cinema to help us along.

One of the greatest absurdities of 3-D is that a technology supposedly meant to take film into the future instead looks constantly to the past. An old novelty made new, we’re supposed to be awed by something that was discarded decades ago. But its goals are noble, if misguided and finally corrupted by the commercial desperation of studios foisting the technology on an audience jaded by decades of familiar mediocrity (at least it offers filmmakers a new way to bore us). It wants to restore some sense of wonder to the audience, and take us back to the origins of cinema, when the spectacle of images on the screen was always enough to delight and amuse.

Consider one of the legends of early cinema: audience members leaping from their seats in shock at the sight of a train coming towards them in the Lumiere brothers’ Arrival of a Train at a Station. Equally notable, if less known, is the fact that the Lumieres would remake the film in 1935 in 3-D. That train keeps coming at us, and we struggle more and more with every passing decade to feel the initial revelation that first roused us. After a certain point, you just give up and lie down on the tracks. What does it matter? It’s never going to arrive anyway.

Fortunately, Herzog does not give in so easily, and still strives to find new ways to stir us cynical audiences out of our detachment. In the film’s moving climactic sequence, Herzog falls silent and gives the film over to the paintings and Ernst Reijseger’s score. He pans slowly across the animals and lets the lights flicker and fade, evoking the torches that would have lit those images long ago. The combination of the 3-D and the shifting light gives a semblance of motion to the images. The animals prowl again in the half-light, if only for a moment. In these scenes, Herzog succeeds in taking us back to the origin of things—of film, of art, of what he terms the human soul. The cave becomes a primal cinema. The audience’s capacity for wonder, deformed by time and abuse, briefly flutters back to life.

You are Here

Do you suffer under the tyranny of Twitter? Is your life story written in status updates? Are your thoughts search engine optimized? When you picture the future, do you imagine Mark Zuckerberg’s sneaker stomping on a human face—forever? If so, you may find comfort in You are Here, Daniel Cockburn’s playfully puzzling debut feature. Perhaps best described as a droll philosophical sketch comedy, the film is an imaginative, often clever reaction to our crippling dependency on information technologies. Under Cockburn’s laser eye, the high-tech world becomes fodder for low-tech surrealism: an archive that may or may not be alive, a call centre that acts like an analog version of FourSquare, a devious genius that tricks the world into only seeing through his eyes (any similarities to the filmmaker are purely coincidental, I’m sure). Of course, it would be easy for a film about technology to turn cold and inhuman, but Cockburn wisely leaves room for the pathos of characters like the Archivist—a sensitive performance by the late, great Tracy Wright—who discover their individuality and free will slowly sapped away by the very systems meant to help them. The film offers two clear alternatives. Borne aloft by technology, we will either crash into the ground in a mess of hubris and silicon, or be carried further and further away from ourselves by our own devices. The film bets its money on the beyond, and it is not, I believe, an optimistic outlook. When our brains become but fleshy outlets for the app store, this film may be fondly recalled as the manifesto of the human resistance.

Submarine

Submarine begins, as these tales so often do, with a precocious, damaged boy lusting after a moody, damaged girl. You may momentarily confuse this with own your life, but I assure you that is purely an illusion borne out of repeated exposure to the legions of wounded young men who appear to grow on celluloid like some sort of fungus. Was that me or Max Fischer? Or Antoine Doinel? Maybe Leolo Lauzon? It can be so hard to recall where the screen ends and memory begins sometimes. The past is just tawdry details and still photos. Far more preferable to watch your childhood printed to film and projected in the dark, where you can’t see anyone wince at the embarrassing bits and the soundtrack is always better.

Nostalgia is a powerful seducer, and there’s nothing quite as seductive as feeling nostalgia for someone else’s childhood. All the best bits of adolescence are there to be enjoyed, all the worst laughed away—it’s not like they belong to you, after all. How remarkable it is then that Richard Ayoade manages to avoid this trap in Submarine, his able and charming debut. True, he swipes many of his best moves from the French New Wave, right down to the adolescent Anna Karina who sends our hero into a hormonal tizzy (even the typography appears to be borrowed from Godard). The whole film could easily turn into an overly mannered nostalgia trip—for childhood, for old French movies where angry young men hated the world and wanted to get laid, for Wes Anderson before he ditched Owen Wilson as his writing partner—but Ayoade’s dark wit keeps the film lively and surprising. Submarine is often beautiful and sometimes very funny, but no one is likely to wish this were his or her childhood.

For one thing, our precocious, damaged boy is actually something of a dick, as the film takes great pains to point out. Neurotic far beyond his years, 15-year-old Oliver Tate nervously monitors his parents’ marriage for signs of cracks. He even goes so far as to chart their sexual activities, where, it must be said, things look grimly flaccid. While envisioning the demise of his family unit, he throws himself into an adolescent affair with a coy pyromaniac named Jordana, only to abandon the girl as her mother undergoes life-or-death surgery. Even worse, he begins spying on his own mother, convinced she is having an affair with the ninja guru next door (turns out it was just a hand job, thank goodness). He even contemplates poisoning Jordana’s dog, partly to prepare her for the inevitably of death and loss, and partly to open up a chance to comfort her with some sweet, sweet, awkward teenage loving. Clearly, this is a disturbed child.

Does he mature in the end? Has he learned a lesson? I’m not optimistic, but I remain uncertain, which is a credit to Ayoade’s largely non-judgmental tone. He’s less concerned with navigating the rocky seas towards a dubious maturity than he is with blurring the lines between adolescent follies and adult mistakes. The director may grant these characters a kind of happy ending—not like the neighbour’s, I should add—but for a film that seems so soft on first brush there are a surprising number of barbed edges buried here. Chances are these people will go on wounding each other in new and different ways, held together only by the fact that some out there happen to love the things (or people) that hurt them. For all the film’s whimsy, there is a certain dark logic to this conclusion. Adolescence, after all, is a horrible parade of embarrassments and accidental cruelties. I’m not so sure about young love, but young masochism sounds pretty plausible to me.

Another Earth

Deliberately—perhaps even desperately—stylish, Mike Cahill’s Another Earth tries in vain to hide a ridiculous plot and poorly conceived characters behind a lot of shaky-cam tomfoolery. Its most successful image is its simplest: a mysterious alternative version of the Earth that has appeared in the sky, lurking in the background like a watchful hero waiting patiently to swoop in and rescue the filmmakers from this mess of their own creation. And what a novel mess it is! Half Dardenne brothers’ moral drama, half Crisis on Infinite Earths, all wrapped up with a surprise! twist! ending! (tell your friends)—how many genres can a film fail in all at once? Brit Marling, who co-scripted with Cahill, stars as Rhoda, a young woman who killed two-thirds of a family in a car accident and now seeks redemption by posing as a maid for the survivor. In between doing the dishes and vacuuming, she daydreams of escaping to that alternate Earth, which remains little more than an underdeveloped distraction, one person’s vague sci-fi concept being another’s lazy plot device, I suppose. (A rocket to another planet means never having to say you’re sorry.) Key supporting characters include the mopey alcoholic crash survivor who seduces Rhoda with Wii boxing and musical saw, and a wisdom-dispensing janitor who pours bleach in his ears and eyes. Sound advice, under the circumstances.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

If you split the difference between the creepy weirdness of the original Planet of the Apes and the hollow slickness of Tim Burton’s remake, you might come up with something like Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Rupert Wyatt’s reboot of the apparently venerable series is surprisingly modest, a rare summer epic that is actually human-scale—or ape-scale, perhaps. Usually once a budget hits a certain point, it’s all you can do to prevent a director from blowing up things willy-nilly, but Wyatt actually has a story to tell. A mediocre one, mind you, but still. Beginning as a loose remake of Frankenstein and ending as a catalogue of sci-fi movie clichés—pandemic paranoia abounds, as do sinister corporations with vaguely allusive names like GeneSys—the film throws together all sorts of inert elements in the vain hope of a reaction. Meanwhile, the human presence provided by actors like James Franco and Freida Pinto (speaking of inert elements) is all but nil, leaving all the film’s pathos to reside in Andy Serkis’ justly lauded motion-capture performance as the Ape Who Would Be King. The eerily life-like eyes of the digital apes are certainly impressive, but if the most expressive part of your film comes out of a computer program, something is definitely amiss. I know this is supposed to be a film about the downfall of our species, but is a little more humanity too much to ask?

Detroit Wild City

Detroit Wild City begins with a union leader lamenting that the city’s parking lots are now empty and overrun with grass. An optimist, on the other hand, might say the parking lot is half-full (of grass, that is). Filmmaker Florent Tillon takes just such an approach, pausing only briefly to eulogize the old Detroit before moving on to capture the new. He interviews residents who explore the ruins of the city, others who fight urban blight with house-crushing parties or turn empty lots into neighbourhood gardens. There’s a measured optimism to the film, but it goes beyond any hippie-scavenger utopian thinking about how nice it would be to raise chickens in abandoned tenements. As one speaker cautions, you can’t have an entire city living on the subsistence model—there’s only so much decay to go around, after all. Man does not live by rubble alone. If the film is about nature versus the city, consider the outcome a draw. Detroit, for all the damage done, is not yet some post-apocalyptic ghost town, but neither is it likely to revive to its former might. But then what will become of it? Wild packs of dogs roam the street. Falcons nest in empty towers. Yet people still gather in the park on Sunday to listen to a man sing how the blues makes him happy. Life, weirdly enough, goes on. The city doesn’t die, so much as mutate.

Meek's Cutoff

As desolate and deceptive as the barren Oregon plain where it is set, Meek’s Cutoff is about the perils of living on too much faith and too little water. In 1845, a small group of settlers place their confidence in Stephen Meek, a scraggly frontiersman of dubious merit and questionable hygiene. The water barrels fill with dust and trust turns to fear, leading the group to switch allegiances to a captured native who they hope will lead them to water. The choice facing the settlers is simple, and impossible: the cocky boasts and false promises of Meek, or the inscrutable silence of the Indian. Everything becomes defined by what it is not: Meek as not a guide, the Indian as not Meek. “Hell is full of bears, but there are no bears here,” Meek says, the implication being that this place, no matter how awful it seems, cannot be hell. But if not hell, then what?

Director Kelly Reichardt has made a name for herself as a specialist in small films with big implications, and Meek’s Cutoff is easily the peak of her career so far. There are obvious strains of political allegory (Meek will likely remind viewers of a certain beady-eyed Texan plutocrat), but the film’s strength lies in its terrifying ambiguities: a fleeting smile across the Indian’s face as the pioneers lose a wagon, the tree at the end that appears like a mirage. Is it a symbol of hope, or is that too obvious? Apparently so, because it turns out the tree of life is half dead. But the ending is Reichardt’s best trick. Every gift is a curse here, every promise a potential lie—especially the promise of resolution. (If you’re going in circles, where do you stop?) All we are given is a morose prophecy from Meek and a slow fade-out on oblivion. The trick is that even though we may never find out what happens to these characters, we already know where this trail leads. History picks up where the film leaves off.