Final Descent

Related Content

• The Selling of the Governator, 2013
  January 17, 2013
• Digital Domain: The Fall of a Movie Empire
  November 8, 2012
• Spielberg, Scorsese, Wenders, Herzog: 3-D films of 2011 transcend the gimmick
  January 5, 2012
• James Cameron Poised to Beat Richard Branson and Triton Submarines to Bottom of the Ocean
  March 21, 2012
• Titanic 3D and American Reunion Test the Shelf Life of Clinton-Era Nostalgia
  April 5, 2012

More About

• Werner Herzog
• James Cameron
• Cave of Forgotten Dreams
• Documentaries
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media

Miles below France’s soil are dark grottoes and jagged columns covered in prehistoric scrawlings. They offer Shamanistic visions of the underworld — grinning half-man, half-bird beasts — and catalog nature’s power struggles — a pride of lions forcing a herd of bison off a cliff. The scenes wax and wane over the caves’ bumps and crevices. When filmmaker Werner Herzog sought to make a documentary about Chauvet, the oldest cave paintings ever discovered, he needed a medium as dynamic as the canvas. So the German ventured into a realm we’d never thought he go. He not only received permission from the French minister of culture to spelunk into Chauvet, but also joined hyper-mainstream James Cameron and Jackass by filming Cave of Forgotten Dreams in, gasp, 3-D. Yet the extra dimension doesn’t feel like a marketing ploy. Herzog uses the in-your-face technology to convey the cave’s tight confines and the ancient art form’s dependence on topography. See what the director behind Grizzly Man can do with a movie about 30,000-year-old finger paintings when it screens at Coral Gables Art Cinema .
May 13-19, 7:30 p.m., 2011