I saw Werner's Herzog beautiful Cave of Forgotten Dreams movie depicting the Cave of Chauvet.
Apart from Jean Clottes putting a touch of self-interpretation with his "fluidity" and "permeability," the movie is a wonderful matter-of-fact description, with no technical fault that I can see.
It makes me ask again the question: why are there only beautiful paintings of animals in pre-glacial rock art, not of plants, not of landscapes, not of people, with very very few exceptions such as the lower part of a woman in Chauvet? And in sculpture, why almost no men, only women?
I found two points in the movie that are new to me. One, the possible role of shadows of humans handling torches in the painting itself, two, the Australian rock artist saying that the spirit is holding his hand while retouching a painting.
Interpreting plants may have been not so important then (more on that later on in this discussion), interpreting landscapes neither, but interpreting animals certainly was paramount. Women were important then as they are now; if it was men who were making the paintings and sculptures, then women would be represented; and if it was women who were gathering, perhaps that would be a subject of lesser interest to men.
The hard question is why other men would not be represented in pictures: the only explanation would be that they were not nearly as predatory then (due to paucity) for these populations as animals. (Of course, men were represented in hand imprints, but that seems to be a different subject).
So, if all these hypotheses hold (but that's a lot of them), animals strategies would occupy much of the thinking of men, which would naturally lead to representation, for those having that capability; the rest, then, would be history ... in the proper sense of the term.
Bertrand du Castel
Apart from Jean Clottes putting a touch of self-interpretation with his "fluidity" and "permeability," the movie is a wonderful matter-of-fact description, with no technical fault that I can see.
It makes me ask again the question: why are there only beautiful paintings of animals in pre-glacial rock art, not of plants, not of landscapes, not of people, with very very few exceptions such as the lower part of a woman in Chauvet? And in sculpture, why almost no men, only women?
I found two points in the movie that are new to me. One, the possible role of shadows of humans handling torches in the painting itself, two, the Australian rock artist saying that the spirit is holding his hand while retouching a painting.
Interpreting plants may have been not so important then (more on that later on in this discussion), interpreting landscapes neither, but interpreting animals certainly was paramount. Women were important then as they are now; if it was men who were making the paintings and sculptures, then women would be represented; and if it was women who were gathering, perhaps that would be a subject of lesser interest to men.
The hard question is why other men would not be represented in pictures: the only explanation would be that they were not nearly as predatory then (due to paucity) for these populations as animals. (Of course, men were represented in hand imprints, but that seems to be a different subject).
So, if all these hypotheses hold (but that's a lot of them), animals strategies would occupy much of the thinking of men, which would naturally lead to representation, for those having that capability; the rest, then, would be history ... in the proper sense of the term.
Bertrand du Castel
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