Sunday, May 08, 2011

Movie: The Caves of Forgotten Dreams

Yesterday was a day of shopping at the South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa, navigating the maze of endless women's shops, in search for some summer attire; part of my wife's Mother's Day gifts.

Right across from the mall is a Regency Theater with a movie that my wife has been asking to see.

The Caves of Forgotten Dreams is a documentary of 1994 finding of the caves in Chauvet France which have unbelievable cave paintings from 32,000 years ago.

This time period is around the time of the Neanderthal cave man.

Now my wife is a Fine Art major and so she was delighted to see the paintings depicted in the cave along  with some of the artifacts from the art history perspective. One of the books she tells me that she read and caused her to be aware of these caves and hence the release of this movie is 'How Art Made the World'.

My wife and I talked about the movie on the way home. She pointed out the man has an inner need to express himself in art and this may have been early man's need to create these paints.

Mmmm. It got me thinking on this inner feeling. In Catholic theology it is stated that man has an inner need to know his creator.  What amazed me about this movie was not only how man at this time was thinking in terms of expressing himself through art, but why man is thinking of creating these paintings to leave them for others later to see a moment in time captured in the art. There were other findings in the cave of make shift altars with a bear skull. Small sculptures and figurines of some sort of fertility gods. Again the inner need to look beyond to a god. All this 32,000 years ago.

This inner need, this logical thinking sets us apart from God's other creations. While Pope Benedict has said the evolution may be inline with Catholic theology, man's creation in the image of God is what is evident in all things man does and creates and thinks.

Pope: Humanity isn't random product of evolution

VATICAN CITY – Pope Benedict XVI marked the holiest night of the year for Christians by stressing that humanity isn't a random product of evolution.
Benedict emphasized the Biblical account of creation in his Easter Vigil homily Saturday, saying it was wrong to think at some point "in some tiny corner of the cosmos there evolved randomly some species of living being capable of reasoning and of trying to find rationality within creation, or to bring rationality into it."
"If man were merely a random product of evolution in some place on the margins of the universe, then his life would make no sense or might even be a chance of nature," he said. "But no, reason is there at the beginning: creative, divine reason."
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These caves were preserved because the opening was sealed by a landslide, sealed until the discovery in 1994. The discovery was opened for tourist for a short time until it was found that mold was found to be growing on the walls of the cave, possibly by the breathing of the tourist.

The caves are now closed, so these viewing of the cave in the movie may be the closest many including scientist will be able to this cave art.

The movie is released in 3D (though we didn't see it in this format). It's one of those hard to find movies but well worth it.

Check it out...

The Chauvet Cave

This magnificent discovery was made in December 1994 and remains one of the most important prehistoric sites to date. It was found accidentally by three local cavers - Christian Hillaire, Eliette Brunel-Deschamps and Jean-Marie Chauvet after whom the cave was named. It has more recently been the subject of Werner Herzog's new film 'Cave of Forgotten Dreams 3D' .
The Chauvet cave is situated next to the famous Pont d'Arc , above the old river bed upon which the Ardèche flowed before the archway opened up and changed its course. It contains a vast array and unique collection of cave paintings dated up to 32,000 years old which makes them the oldest cave paintings in the world.
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Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams: the real art underground


On 13 December 1994, on a cliff face in the Ardèche gorge in the south of France, three speleologists first felt a slight draught of air coming from the rocks. They pulled them away and crawled into a space barely wide enough for the human body. Descending a steep shaft, they found themselves in a vast underground cavern of astonishing beauty.
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