Herzog's 'Cave of Forgotten Dreams'

The hottest thing in the art world is 30,000 years old: Unseen, virtually since they were rediscovered by archeologists in 1994, the cave pictures near Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc, in southern France, are said to be twice as old as the famed horse paintings of Lascaux. They have been kept off limits to protect them from the hot breath of humans, which would undo the delicate preservation accomplished by an ice age rock slide that sealed off the caves some 8,000 years ago.

Somehow, the director Werner Herzog -- who, lest it be forgotten, once dragged a ship over a mountain (for "Fitzcarraldo") -- has managed to get inside with a 3-D camera, and the result is an epic of human aspiration and a reimagining of our ancient selves.

The excitement of "Cave of Forgotten Dreams," narrated by Herzog in his Bavarian-accented English, is not so much about the paintings per se, which are beautiful, but about who put them there and why. Also, whence they sprung: Did these proto-artists, as Herzog asks, see the animals? Or dream them? Were there other painters, other caves? What was the purpose of reproducing these animals on a cave's walls? The layering of different pictures (drawings sometimes made 5,000 years apart, according to carbon dating) poses one mystery; another is presented by a horse whose eight legs suggest movement and speed.

Could the painters of "Cave of Forgotten Dreams" have anticipated cinema? Herzog thinks so. We will never know the answers -- and no ordinary person will be able to see the caves except by watching this film. But Herzog is anything but ordinary. And he asks all the right questions.