INTERVIEW: WERNER HERZOG ON THE BIRTH OF ART

Author(s): WERNER HERZOG

Source: Archaeology, Vol. 64, No. 2 (March/April 2011), pp. 32-39
Published by: Archaeological Institute of America
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 in southeastern France to film the sites Paleolithic art . The result, his film Cave of Forgotten Dreams,
Last in which southeastern
which will be released this March
spring, iswill , be preeminent
a document releasedearliest
of some of humankind's France and this to filmmaker film spr
most extraordinary

paintings . Since the cave was discovered in December 1994, few people, mostly researchers, have seen the artwork,

owing to the cave's extremely delicate climate and concerns about preserving the ancient paintings. But the film

is more than a tour of the cave . It is an exploration of what the science of archaeology is revealing about the

Aurignacian people - Europe's first artists - and the origins of the modern human mind . Part of the film focuses

on the work offean Clottes, the former director of research for the Chauvet Cave Project, and Jean-Michel Geneste,

the project's current director, and what their work tells us about how the Aurignacian people may have lived their

lives and connected to their world through art. In November, Archaeology senior editor Zach Zorich was
invited to Herzogs Manhattan apartment for an extended interview about the unique challenges of making this

film, the kinship among artists across the ages, and Herzogs archaeologist grandfather.

INTERVIEW

WERNER HERZOG
ON THE BIRTH OF ART
ARCHAEOLOGY: There are hundreds of ancient sites in the
world that have really fascinating artwork* What was it that
attracted you to Chauvet?
WERNER HERZOG: It is one of the greatest and most sensa-
tional discoveries in human culture and, of course, what is so
fascinating is that it was preserved as a perfect time capsule
for 20,000 years* The quality of the art, which is from a
time so far, so deep back in history, is stunning* Its not that
we have what people might call the primitive beginnings of
painting and art* It is right there as if it had burst on the scene
fully accomplished* That is the astonishing thing, to under-
stand that the modern human soul somehow awakened* It is
not a long slumber and a slow, slow, slow awakening* I think
it was a fairly sudden awakening* But when I say "sudden" it
may have gone over 20,000 years or so* Time does not factor
in when you go back into such deep prehistory*
ARCHAEOLOGY: You are famous for taking on some very
difficult challenges in filmmaking, especially in Fitzcarraldo
where you hauled a steamboat over a mountain* In this case,
the limitations were of a different nature* You had to stay
on a two-foot-wide walkway, and had only a short period
of time to film*
HERZOG: Yes, and having only three light panels* Of
course, we were only allowed to take along what we could
carry in our own hands, so we couldn't move heavier
equipment into the cave* The most intense challenge came
from the fact that when filming in 3-D, you cannot move
a 3-D camera around like a regular film camera* If you
move, for example, closer to an object, the lenses actually
have to be closer together, and when you are fairly close
you even have to make them "squint" slightly* We had to
reconfigure our camera to take close-up shots of the paint-
ings* It is a high-precision, technical thing to have to do, in
semidarkness on a narrow walkway* We had a fairly brief
period of time to film* When the researchers left in early
April, I had the cave practically undisturbed for filming,
but only for six days, and only four hours each day* Of
course, later in the season the carbon dioxide level in the
branch of the cave where you have the Panel of the Lions
becomes dangerously high* In other parts of the cave there
is a fairly high level of radon, and it has a cumulative effect
on your lungs* So, we had to move around between toxic
gases and radioactive gases*
ARCHAEOLOGY: Did these shooting conditions limit the
story you were able to tell?

32 ARCHAEOLOGY • March/April 2011

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HERZOG: No, I was able to tell what I had to tell, but we had
to be completely focused, very fast, and very professional So,
when I am asked, what was your feeling inside the cave? Did
it somehow strike you like a religious experience? No, it was
professionalism that was foremost* But there were moments
where the crew moved out and I just stayed behind for five
minutes, which I apparently was not supposed to do* But I
did it anyway and the guards knew I wouldn't do anything
foolish so I stood there in silence and looked*

ARCHAEOLOGY: What was it like in those five minutes?

HERZOG: It is really awesome, absolutely awesome*

ARCHAEOLOGY: The film seems to convey what it is really

like to be in the cave* How were you able to capture that?

HERZOG: We talked a lot about how still the cave is* When
you hold your breath you can actually hear your own heart-
beat* I said to Jean Clottes, we have to have this in the film,
even if its staged, even if its a scripted text* But of course, it
is not fake* It is exactly what you experience when you are
in there* In making the film we paid attention to details, to
sound, to music* That's what moviemaking is all about* Its
about steering the flow of the viewers imagination, to awaken
the imagination, to sensitize them to sound, to sensitize them
to imagery, to sensitize them to life in general* The movie
proceeds very, very carefully and very methodically* And this
is why at the end when you see these endless shots and pans
of the paintings you see them with a different depth of feel- used by the artists* They did it with phenomenal skill, with
ing than if you were just going through a catalog* And thats great artistic skill, and there was something expressive about
what cinema can accomplish* it, a drama of rock transformed and utilized, in the drama of
paintings* This is why it was imperative to shoot in 3-D*
ARCHAEOLOGY: Why did you choose to film in 3-D?
ARCHAEOLOGY: Were there any of the paintings that you
HERZOG: 3-D was imperative because I initially thought found particularly striking or moving?
there were flat walls and paintings in the cave* But there are
no flat areas* The drama of the bulges and niches was actually HERZOG: Yes, the Panel of the Horses and the Panel of
the Lions, of course* The lions in particular are just incred-
Werner Herzog and director of photography ible because a whole group of lions is looking, is stalking
Peter Zeitlinger review footage from Cave of
something* The intensity of their gaze, all looking exactly at
Forgotten Dreams , which was filmed in 3-D.
something, focusing on something* You dont know exactly
on what they focus and it has an intensity of art, of depiction,
which is just awesome*

ARCHAEOLOGY: You also say that there is a sense of motion

in some of these images, and talk about this as being an early
form of animation* Do you feel a connection between what
the cave artists at Chauvet were doing and what you were
doing as a filmmaker?

HERZOG: Well, there is one moment in the film where I am

speaking about the charcoal that was found in the vicinity of
the Panel of the Horses, the charcoal fires* There is a row of
fires which was used for illumination, but placed in a way that
when you are close to the Panel of the Horses your own shad-

ARCHAEOLOGY • March/April 2011

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ow becomes a part of the image, apparently as an integral part
of the staging* Of course in the film, I couldn't help showing
Fred Astaire dancing with his own shadow in Swing Time ,
which is quintessential cinema* In it, a human being, Fred
Astaire, is moving with his own shadows and all of a sudden
the shadows do something separate and become independent
of him, do mischief, and he still catches up and dances with
them* It is one of the great moments of cinema*
ARCHAEOLOGY: You admire the cinema of the past, but
you have said that the imagery of todays civilization is
inadequate, that it is absurd and useless, and that the lack of
adequate imagery is a danger of the same magnitude as the
overcrowding of our planet* Why do you believe that, and
how does this film confront that issue?
HERZOG: Well, that's a very condensed form of a more com-
plex thought, which has to do with language and imagery*
When you are looking around at images, when you watch
television for six consecutive hours, or when you open a
catalog from a travel agency, you immediately know those
are worn-out images not really adequate to our state of
civilization* If you are lagging behind it is dangerous, and
it brings decay with it* In America, for example, you have a
lot of innovation in language* However, almost worldwide,
there are very few attempts to bring images up to the status
of our civilization*
www.archaeology.org 35
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The Panel of the Big Lions shows a pride of 14 individuals
stalking bison. The painting follows the contours of a niche in
the cave wall, lending dimensionality to each of the figures.
ARCHAEOLOGY: Another idea you have mentioned is that
you are searching for a new grammar of imagery, and I was
wondering how the images of Chauvet Cave play into that,
or do they?
HERZOG: That's a very interesting question because my
immediate reaction was, what you see there is not just a
vocabulary - this is a megaloceros, this is a wooly rhino, this
is a lion* Yes, you do have a complete new vocabulary for the
first time, but you also have new grammar: How do horses
interact with each other? How do lions charge and stalk?
Its the entire ensemble, focused on something that we do
not see* So there's a very mysterious, obvious grammar of
depiction there, narratives, whole stories* And, by the way,
the painters of Chauvet are not accountants of truth, of the
variety of species* They are not accountants* They are not
cinema vérité of their time*
ARCHAEOLOGY: They are not creating a taxonomy*
HERZOG: Exactly* They are creating something at a complete-
ly different level, something imaginary, probably ritualistic* I
say this with necessary caution: probably something interi-
or - the interior landscape of their souls* And it coincides
with the landscape near the cave, the Pont d'Arc with this
natural arch, which is like a purely Wagnerian opera stage.
ARCHAEOLOGY: You are talking about a limestone arch that
goes over the river Ardeche*
HERZOG: Yes, what I am trying to say in the movies voice-
over is that this kind of staging of the landscape as an interior
landscape does not belong to the German romanticists alone.
It belongs to the Aurignacian people, and that makes them
immediately familiar to me» The kind of wild, exuberant
fantasy and the stylisations* Ive done this all my life in my
movies* That is why I feel absolutely at home, in a way, when
I move into the cave, as strange and as remote and as foreign
as some of it is, and beyond the reach of my understanding*
But that doesn't matter* There were people out there who
created something absolutely fantastic*
ARCHAEOLOGY: And at the end of the film you introduce
a postscript, the idea of radioactive mutant albino crocodiles
from a nearby animal preserve getting loose and heading for
Chauvet* Why did you do that?
HERZOG: It has to do with pure science fiction fantasy* That
is the beauty of it* It allows me to introduce the idea that I
am not an accountant of truth, that I intensify something,
something into an ecstasy of truth instead* I've been very
much into the quest for ecstatic truth in all my films*
ARCHAEOLOGY: Do the incredible images in the cave con-
front this problem of worn-out imagery?
HERZOG: No, not explicitly* But it shows that images burst
onto the scene and into our consciousness in a phenomenal
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The Panel of the Horses is among the cave's most technically
adept paintings. The figure of the horse on the right was
outlined in charcoal, shaded with a mixture of charcoal and
clay, and engraved around its profile with fine white lines.
way, completely accomplished, and somehow, of course,
adequate to the civilization of Aurignacian man, no doubt
about it* We should never forget the dexterity of these people*
They were capable of creating a flute* It is a high-tech proce-
dure to carve a piece of mammoth ivory and split it in half
without breaking it, hollow it out, and realign the halves* We
have one indicator of how well their clothing was made* In
a cave in the Pyrenees, there is a handprint of a child maybe
four or five years old* The hand was apparently held by his
mother or father, and ocher was spit against it to get the
contours and you see part of the wrist and the contours of a
sleeve* The sleeve is as precise as the cuffs of your shirt* The
precision of the sleeve is stunning*
ARCHAEOLOGY: You have resisted having the label' artist"
applied to you* Were the people of Chauvet artists or crafts-
men in your estimation?
HERZOG: In this case, you can clearly say this is art, and
you can say it easily* It goes back to a time when there was,
for example, no art market, no exhibitions, no galleries* No
doubt in my heart that this is art, and its some of the greatest
that the human race ever created, period* It cant get any bet-
ter, and it hasn't gotten much better* That's a great mystery*
ARCHAEOLOGY: There is a great shot in the film of a paint-
ing of a half-woman, half-bison figure that wraps around
a stalactite* Until now, the painting has only been photo-
graphed from one side* How difficult was it to get that shot
considering the constraints of the cave?
HERZOG: Well, we were not allowed to step beyond the
walkway* When we were alone and only with the guards, at
the end of one of the last days, I said, "lets give it a try" We
had a boom for the mike with us, although we had no sound
man, and I said to the guards, "If we held the camera man
and tied him securely to the boom, could he possibly extend
this tiny camera a little bit beyond the walkway?" And they
looked at us, and they looked at the camera, and they just
nodded and knew we would do it right* We couldn't extend
it really far otherwise the pole might have fallen over so we
were still limited* But we've seen a little bit more than anyone
else could ever see* But in a way its good that you do not
know what is on the other side of this stalactite and how
the painting continues* Sometimes it is better to have a big
question and no answer*
ARCHAEOLOGY: Why is that?
HERZOG: Because it is much more intriguing* It becomes
much more an element that forces us to think, forces us to
imagine, forces us to use all our intelligence and all our capac-
ity for vision* And its the same in archaeology* You hardly
ever have full answers and much of the interpretation has
to be with a clear vision and understanding of how people
would live, let s say, in England in late Neolithic times* How
do you imagine it, and how do you visualize it and interpret
things? That's the beauty of it, which is beyond the sheer
factual findings*
Just below the Panel of the Horses is an
image called the Confronted Rhinoceroses,
which may depict two males fighting or a
male and a female about to mate.
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ARCHAEOLOGY: You've talked about how culture condi-
tions the way we interpret images* Have we lost something
between the modern day and the time of Chauvet?
HERZOG: No, not lost* We simply have changed* We are
fundamentally changed and yet there is something about
humanness, there is something about the modern human
soul, which awakened during the time of Chauvet, or maybe
a little bit earlier, we don't know*
ARCHAEOLOGY: What is your definition of humanness?
HERZOG: I think as Jean-Michel Geneste says, it is an
adaptation to the world, language, symbolic representations,
including rituals like burial, like probably cannibalism, initia-
tion rites* There is a point where we shift away from a purely
material culture*
ARCHAEOLOGY: Do you feel the story that science is telling
of Chauvet Cave is inadequate in some way?
HERZOG: No, its not inadequate, and I'm glad that it does
not proclaim to have a full explanation* There is a younger
generation of archaeologists at work who are very much into
declaring the findings as they are and not over-interpreting
them* Everything in the previous generations was declared
ritualistic and part of ceremonies and the young generation
says "maybe, but we do not know*" I find it a healthy attitude*
It will certainly be the school of archaeology that will prevail
in the foreseeable future*
ARCHAEOLOGY: You included quite a bit about the way
archaeology is done in this film* As I was doing research
for this interview, I was surprised to find out that you actu-
ally have a very personal connection to archaeology Your
grandfather, Rudolph Herzog, was an archaeologist who
excavated in Greece*
HERZOG: Yes, he discovered and excavated the Asklepieion,
on the island of Kos, and that was his life s work in the early
twentieth century*
ARCHAEOLOGY: What is the Asklepieion?
HERZOG: Dedicated to Asclepius, the god of medicine, it
was like a hospital and resort* I think my grandfather came
across it through studying texts* Originally he was a classicist*
He was a teacher of ancient Greek at a university, and at
that time there were discoveries of texts, and one was a text
by Herondas, a fairly unimportant writer* It describes the
Asklepieion - two women are in dialogue and describe it*
My grandfather set out and left his profession as a classicist
behind, a little bit like Schliemann [Heinrich Schliemann,
the discoverer of a city that may be Troy from Homers Iliad].
He was just barely 30 or so, got married, and took his wife,
my grandmother, to the island of Kos*
ARCHAEOLOGY: This would have been the early 1900s*
HERZOG: Yes, and he had an astonishing eye for locations*
I have seen, for example, a vast field with all these trees and
vineyards* Somehow in the middle of all this he chose to dig
and found a late Roman bath* How? Why right there? Or,
the Asklepieion, which is high up on the slope of this small
mountain ridge on the island* He had a fantastic eye for
a situation that was, lets say, 2,000 years earlier* He could
To preserve the cave's fragile environment, Herzog and his crew had to
do all of their filming from a metal walkway that runs through the cave.
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imagine how it looked with forests and where a facility like
that might be built* I really liked him for that* Unfortunately,
he was insane at the end of his life and I practically know him
only as being insane, but I really loved him*
ARCHAEOLOGY: Did you have a chance to visit the
Asklepieion?
HERZOG: Yes* I went out when I was 15* I was more inter-
ested in my grandfathers generation than in my parents'
generation and I followed his footsteps trying to find out
what he had done and where he had done it* That is why I
went to Greece and actually made my first long feature film
in 1966 on the island of Kos, Signs of Life.
ARCHAEOLOGY: As you were making this film, Cave of For-
gotten Dreams , were you surprised at how much archaeology
has changed since the days of your grandfather?
HERZOG: Yes, or since Schliemann* My grandfather was
basically at the end of that generation, more or less* There
were more modern methods at that time, and I think he
looked at Schliemann with a suspicious eye considering the
techniques they applied at the time* Its quite extraordinary
what they are doing now* How they have new, almost foren-
sic-like science to collect pollen and understand the vegeta-
tion* They do things that are unprecedented, in a way, and its
very beautiful to see that* I'm really intrigued by modern-day
archaeology* For example, a square foot in one of the caves
in the film - it took five months to remove half a centimeter
of sediment* Every single grain of sand was picked up with
a pair of pincers and documented with laser measurements*
And all of a sudden it makes clear things like the flute, the
flute from Hohle Fels Cave [in Germany],
which is mammoth ivory, and the tiny
fragments that were not understood for
decades, but they were preserved* That's
a fine thing, yes, until somebody came
who had the kind of imagination like the
young woman who is in the film, Maria
Malina, an archaeological technician who
had the insight and started to put the
fragments together*
ARCHAEOLOGY: Yes, I think those
moments of insight really draw people
into archaeology*
HERZOG: Yes, of course* We do not need
any other Tutankhamuns tomb with all
its treasures* We need context* We need
understanding* We need knowledge of
historical events to tie them together* We
dont know much* Of course we know a
lot, but it is context thats missing, not
treasures* ■
ARCHAEOLOGY • March/April 2011

Dating
After the cave paintings were discovered in December 1994,
the first question archaeologists faced was, how old are they?
At first glance, the paintings technical sophistication made
them seem relatively recent, perhaps 10,000 to 15,000 years
old* Radiocarbon dating of the charcoal in the black pig-
ments, however, showed that the earliest paintings in the cave
were made 35,000 years ago» The date overturned the idea
that Europe's earliest cave paintings were crude and simple
and that artistic techniques had to be refined over thousands
of years before the finest cave art could be made* More than
80 radiocarbon dates have been taken from the torch marks
and paintings on the walls, as well as the animal bones and
charcoal that litter the floor, providing a detailed chronology
of the cave* The dates show that the artwork was made in two
separate periods, one 35,000 and one 30,000 years ago*
Cave Bears
The way that people used Chauvet Cave was shaped by their
interactions with the caves primary residents, the now-extinct
cave bear* Humans do not appear to have lived in the cave and
it is likely that the paintings were made in the spring or sum-
mer when the bears would not have been hibernating* The
bears themselves seem to have held a special significance for
the artists who worked in the cave, in addition to being sub-
jects of the artwork* A bear skull was placed on top of a large,
flat rock in an area called the Skull Chamber* There is evi-
dence a fire was lit before it was set there, raising the possibility
that it had some kind of ritual function* More than 190 bear
skulls have been found in the cave, giving paleontologists an
enormous amount of information about a species that disap-
peared 20,000 to 25,000 years ago and used caves in ways that
were similar to how humans used them* The bears organized
the space within the cave by digging shallow depressions in
More than 190 cave bear skulls have been found
in Chauvet Cave. Why this one was placed at the
edge of a large stone block remains a mystery.
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Some of the paintings in Chauvet
Cave incorporate claw marks
left by bears, making the art an
interspecies collaboration.
the cave floor, possibly as sleeping areas*
They also made their own marks on the
cave walls by repeatedly raking their
claws across the limestone, incising sets
of four parallel lines* In some cases the
paintings in Chauvet Cave are a kind
of collaboration between humans and
bears* Human artists incorporated
claw marks into some of their paint-
ings* In others, cave bears made their
marks on top of the paintings, adding
a new element to the images that cave
art expert Jean Clottes calls "the magic
of the bears*'
Tracings
Studying the paintings is an intensive process that begins
by going into the cave to photograph an image* The digital
photograph is enlarged in the laboratory* Then a researcher
places a sheet of transparent plastic over the photo and traces
the image in as much detail as possible* The tracing is then
brought inside the cave to check it against the original paint-
ing* At this stage the researchers also move a light at different
angles around the painting to reveal any hidden details of the
image* The process forces the researchers to put themselves
in the place of the painters and understand the variety of
techniques that were used to make the artwork* Some of the
images were made after scraping away a layer of dark brown
clay that covers the cream-colored limestone walls* Most
were made by drawing with a piece of charcoal, or painting
with a brush or finger covered in red pigment, or by spit-
ting pigment against the wall* As the tracing is created, the
research team learns how the images were composed and the
order in which the lines were drawn* "People ask me/ Why
dont you use photos?'" says Clottes* "Well, a photo is not a
study*** the human mind is still the better computer*" - ZZ