Ask your average film critic what he or she thinks of 3D, and you probably won't get a positive answer. It adds nothing, they say, except a hefty surcharge; it dims the picture; it causes headaches; it fills the frame with distracting and detracting gimmick effects. It is the next (d)evolution of American cinema's crippling blockbuster syndrome. It is, as Roger Ebert put it, "a waste of a perfectly good dimension."
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True enough. But come Wednesday or Thursday, many of those same critics — if they haven't already — will be hailing the one employment of 3D that is, assuredly, Not Like The Others: Werner Herzog's "Cave of Forgotten Dreams," which opens Friday. This won't prove that the critics are all hypocrites, nor will it retroactively prove anything about the "Green Hornets" of the world. For all its piety, Herzog's film is not the Jesus of 3D movies, planted on Earth to redeem the legions that have sinned against our eyes. But it will prove, or at least should prove, that there can be something to this ineluctable modality of the visible.
Herzog is a filmmaker obsessed with extremes. They can be spatial, as in "Encounters at the End of the World," or psychological, as in ... well, most of his other movies, "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans" included. Here the extreme he touches is temporal: He brings us to the Chauvet caves in Southern France, where the oldest known human artworks reside.
As a Herzog movie, "Cave" is significant for being full of a kind of coitus interruptus. Usually, the man has his way with the material he's documenting, however sacred it seems. "Little Dieter Needs to Fly" is famous for the sequence in which Herzog forces Dieter Dengler, a former Vietnam War POW, to relive part of his capture. "Grizzly Man," likewise, is famous for the sequence in which Herzog — not the viewer, not the victim's family, but Herzog — listens to a recording of the death of Timothy Treadwell. In "Cave," however, Herzog is always at the mercy of the French government. Rather than getting an all-access pass to the transcendent images from time immemorial, he's stuck moving along a metal walkway, led along by tour guides. He and his film crew can only stay in the cave for an hour at a time. He can never, under any circumstances, reach out and touch.
And yet, for all the mediations that come between image and spectator, the film is powerful. This is partly because of Herzog's ever-poetic ruminations — here, he basks in the religiosity of the ancient works, urging us to reconsider ourselves "homo spiritualis" — but it's also because of one particular mediation used wisely: 3D. The effect shows us vividly that these are not paintings on canvas, nor are they paintings that wished to be on canvas. They are paintings on and of the rock, wedded to its veins and contours. The film, a 2D work injected with an illusory sense of depth, mimics the medium that is its fixation. Even if it's fake (and Herzog knows it's fake), that very imitation constitutes a meaningful, valuable documentary mode.
In a film of artificial limitations, a film that often situates us on that walkway from which the image can't quite be apprehended, an artificial way of seeing becomes crucial. The dimension may be a waste, but sometimes it's a necessity.
