Slightly off-topic, but has anybody seen Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams yet?
My first revelation while watching Cave of Forgotten Dreams (IFC Films), Werner Herzog's three-dimensional documentary about 30,000-year-old paintings, seemed face-palm silly a moment later: Our caveman ancestors really knew how to draw. Well of course they did. Prehistoric man wasn't skipping through the glacial landscape and scrawling on rocks like a child. He was an adult, just like you and me—and had an adult's capacity for graceful lines and shading. With a bit of homo savvy, he even appears to have figured out how to depict motion in his art. The film shows us, at one point, an eight-legged bison painted on limestone, as if the animal were posed in sequential frames of action. A sort of "proto-cinema," Herzog calls it.
Herzog is right that the setting for his film—the magnificent Chauvet cave in southern France—feels like an ancient movie theater. The paintings are situated in a dark chamber draped with calcite curtains and lit up with flickering beams from the camera crew. Framed by stalagmites, the caveman drawings seem as if they're being projected onto the walls via flashlight. (Some are overlaid on even more ancient marks—the four-lined scratches of cave bears.) After spending 90 minutes in this environment, minus some time for talking-head interviews and the obligatory epilogue about albino crocodiles, I re-emerged into the sunlight a little shaken. And quite moved: Cave of Forgotten Dreams is a Herzogian masterpiece—a ponderous and nauseating theme-park ride, but one that unfolds as a probing essay on the history of art.
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movi ... at_ya.html
I haven't seen it yet, but it sounds awesome.
Even more off-topic, Allegro, have you heard of the Rosslyn Motet? (oops, just did a search and realised you'd made a post about it already, in a thread by Slad. I agree with your take, that the motet theory is, at least in part, a myth-making commercial enterprise, or has now become one. I was at Rosslyn last year, and it
is a genuinely strange place though).
ROSSLYN Chapel holds many secrets. For hundreds of years experts and visitors alike have puzzled over the carvings in the chapel. Whilst some debate whether they point to hidden treasure, Edinburgh composer Stuart Mitchell thinks he has cracked one part of the enigma.
He believes that the ornate ceiling of carved arches, featuring 213 decorated cubes holds a code for medieval music. His father Thomas Mitchell spent 20 years cracking this code in the ceiling and now Stuart is orchestrating the findings for a new recording called The Rosslyn Motet. They hope that the music, when played on medieval instruments in situ, will resonate throughout the chapel unlocking a secret in the stone.
The breakthrough to interpreting the notation came when Mitchell's father discovered that the markings carved on the face of the cubes seem to match a phenomenon called Cymatics or Chladni patterns. Chladni patterns form when a sustained note is used to vibrate a sheet of metal covered in powder producing marks. The frequency used dictates the shape of the pattern, for example; the musical note A below middle C vibrates at 440 KHz and produces a shape that looks like a rhombus. Different notes can produce various shapes including flowers, diamonds and hexagons - shapes all present on the Rosslyn cubes. Stuart Mitchell believes this is "beyond coincidence" and has assigned a note to each cube.
Ernst Chladni first documented the phenomenon in the late 18th century - yet it appears to be present in a 15th century building. Which begs the question: "Was Sir William St Clair (the man who built Rosslyn Chapel) familiar with sciences far in advance of his time?".
Stuart Mitchell believes a link between the Knights Templar – who may have gleaned advanced Eastern scientific knowledge during their stay in Jerusalem during the Crusades – and Rosslyn could explain the encoded musical notes.
They managed to play the music in the chapel, but nothing happened except that they made quite a lot of money from selling the CD.
Since the crypt below the chapel is sealed off to everyone except the Sinclairs, who knows what the stone revealed down there? Maybe there's a bunch of old Templars staggering about in the dark, going :"Who hath awakened me?!"
"The universe is 40 billion light years across and every inch of it would kill you if you went there. That is the position of the universe with regard to human life."
