The Cave of Forgotten Dreams

The documentary, The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, is primarily told from the judicial rhetorical pattern. However, the director’s decision to add a postscript that changed to a deliberative focus created a fiery controversy. The postscript, as suggested in the Vanity Fair article Are We Really As Weird As Werner Herzog’s White Crocodiles?, Herzog presents the alligators as a metaphor for humans in an ever changing climate. Herzog’s ending metaphor suggests that although we should appreciate the past for its beauty we should mainly focus on ways to adapt to the world’s current issues. If it was Werner Herzog’s intention to motivate or persuade the viewers of this documentary to act somehow it is my opinion that he made the ending too disconnected from the rest of the film. If it was his goal to point out an interesting quality of human nature then he succeeded and the swift subject change almost becomes a summary of what he learned from his experiences within the cave and while making the documentary.

Many aspects of the film, such as the long shots of the landscape and the interviews conducted in the wild, attribute to the eco-friendly theme. Long shots were taken by helicopter of the beautiful area surrounding the cave. These images work to remind the viewer of a past where nature was primarily undisturbed. The footage of Werner Herzog and his camera crew along with a few scientists slowly exploring and mapping out the unknown in the cave allows the viewer to rediscover that forgotten time. The handheld filming style, although required for their initial filming, clearly benefitted the impact of the first exposure to the cave, allowing the viewer to be further immersed in the surreal situation. The strength of this effect fills the mind with thoughts of a symbiotic state of nature and pushes the current environmental threats momentarily out of the viewer’s memory. This sets up an intense contrast to the first image of the postscript – a nuclear power plant. It’s location, not far from the newly discovered cave, is fairly ironic. The entire film shared images of beauty and a nature yet to be tampered with by the modern day. In contrast, the postscript revealed that the modern day was only a stone’s throw away. The image of the nuclear plant is used to throw the viewer bluntly back into reality. Although the film sends the message of appreciate the past, the postscript adds an ethical element to our existence. The sudden jolt to and from contradictory ideas may be construed as Herzog’s attempt to motivate the viewer to readapt to the problems that are in the present.