Heroes: Werner Herzog
Werner Herzog. Photo: Red Bulletin
The veteran filmmaker is no fly on the wall, let alone one in the soup: he’s the hornet that stings.
A day in the life of Werner Herzog could take place anywhere in the world. On this particular one, we find ourselves in a harsh region of southern France, having climbed up above a seething whitewater river to a vertical rock face.
Herzog pauses for a moment and then points down below, at the people who lived here 30,000 years ago. Back then, the locals had a strong sense of the drama that this landscape conveyed; it has remained immediately evident to all. Around the Pont D’Arc, the awe-inspiring natural stone bridge over the Ardèche river, those people lived in caves, a number of which remain.
Unique among these is the Chauvet Cave, a Stone Age place covered by a rockslide and rediscovered only in 1994, when it was measured, photographed and closed off again. It was too important and fragile to allow public access. Now, a dozen cameras and audio sensors monitor any movement. A door half a metre thick at the entrance separates the outside world from the ancient world. Behind that, a rocky track leads 10m downwards through a narrow tunnel, where it’s easy to imagine a pair of crouching sabre-toothed tigers, stomachs rumbling with the hunger of tens of thousands of years.
The security measures protect the oldest known cave paintings in the world, a truly priceless trove. The rockslide has afforded an unparalleled state of conservation, not only of the art on the walls. “For starters,” says Herzog, “the footprint of an eight-year-old boy was found, and next to it the traces of a wolf, as if it had been his companion.”
After this splendid isolation, the cave system with its four caverns is under threat from all sorts of outside influences, starting with carbon dioxide and moisture in the air. Irretrievable damage is risked every time a person enters the cave.
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