The New Yorker & Me: Werner Herzog's "Cave of Forgotten Dreams": 3 Reviews

Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Goldfield, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Thursday, June 9, 2011

Werner Herzog's "Cave of Forgotten Dreams": 3 Reviews

Behold the gorgeous use of “ripple” – one of the English language’s great tactile words - in two recent reviews of Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Julian Bell, in his “Werner Herzog and the World’s Oldest Paintings” (NYR Blog, May 4, 2011) says:

But finally we surrender to the flow of their art, immersed at length in the interplay of torchlight, rippling cave flanks, scorings, charcoalings and red ochre.

That “rippling cave flanks” is superb. The whole sentence is sublime – one of the best sentences that I’ve read in a long time. Amazingly, Anthony Lane, in his “In The Dark” (The New Yorker, May 2, 2011), comes close to topping it. He says:

Above all, we return to the animals, which are sketched with gusto not on flat surfaces but on constant bumps and curves. The effect – perhaps, the original intention, under flickering flame light – is to ripple them into the illusion of perpetual motion.

Lane’s use of “ripple” as a verb is inspired. I need to see this film! A third review – Peter Campbell’s “In The Cave” (London Review of Books, April 28, 2011) provides the clinching description:

Herzog leads you to a place you will never visit and the sense inside the cave that the 3D image produces makes it all the more tantalizing. You want to get your own torch and walk where the film-makers walked.

I’m certainly tantalized. I can hardly wait to feast my eyes on Herzog's film.

Credit: The above artwork is titled "The Panel of the Lions, Chauvet Cave"; it's used to illustrate Julian Bell's "Werner Herzog and the World's Oldest Paintings" (NYR Daily, May 4, 2011).