Obsession, thy name is Herzog

Some filmmakers have names that cause you automatically to get excited. One of those names for me is Herzog. As in the German filmmaker Werner Herzog .

No other filmmaker I can name goes back and forth between narrative and documentary film as easily as Herzog does. His narrative films, which range from the weird (” Even Dwarfs Started Small”) to the crazed (“Fitzcarraldo”) to the biographic (“Rescue Dawn”), are never anything but interesting. And his documentaries, which in many cases are explorations of obsessive behavior (“Grizzly Man”), are even more so.

But even when they don’t key on obsession, as in his latest release, “Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” Herzog’s documentaries are meditations on the very nature of existence. Not so much about the why of humanity but certainly the what. And in this case the how.

Herzog takes his camera crew to southern France where they explore the depths of a cave that, cut off from exposure until 1994, boasts the oldest known rock art — paintings that are some 32,000 years old. Though interesting to behold, the paintings might not be enough to hold our attention for a feature-length running time. But Herzog finds a way.

First, he shot the film in 3-D, which puts you right in the middle of the interior world. And then he continually poses questions, and provides some philosophizing of his own as answers. In between, he manages to pull off a number of interesting shots, some of which make his camera feel like a seeing-eye bird, and capture the essence of paintings that are far more sophisticated that you can imagine.

The result is a fascinating experience. Just the kind of experience that Herzog has been providing us for five decades.

Below : The trailer for “Cave of Forgotten Dreams.”