Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010)

One of like five movies whose existence justifies the 3D craze of the late-00s and early-10s, completely audacious in Herzog’s swaggering, romantic way to be offered access to these caves and go “yes, and I will do it in 3D to best approximate how the shadows danced to animate these shockingly beautiful figures on the wall.”

I know how crazy this sounds on its surface but getting to see this movie in 3D some 16 years after release feels every bit as miraculous as when I got to see Super Mario Brothers (1993) on film after years of obsession with a text that marked a very real and very strange kind of personal growth. Said growth is easier to explain with SMB — I was a child when I saw it, and I felt like I’d glimpsed some strange permutation of the grown-up imagination, barely disguised as the hero of a handful of video games I loved but was too clumsy to beat, let alone master — but watching these scientists, many of whom were also artists, channel their passion and skill for sight, sound, vision, physical movement, and technical acuity into this painfully beautiful fragment of the human soul compelled me to think more clearly, more purposefully, about my own work and person. Herzog’s asides about the Manhattan phone book and albino crocodiles probably had me up until three in the morning writing some of the most dog-ass poetry of my life, and getting to share that feeling now with my partner over a decade and a half later was truly incredible. I don’t know what a “6K restoration with Dolby Atmos sound” is, but just like all the other times I watch a Herzog movie, I am grateful to that man, for all of the little hustles and schemes he’s worked to make films like this possible.