"Let me offer a kindred a model from a champion cinematic digressor. For his 2010 documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams Werner Herzog was granted exclusive access by the French government to the cave of Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc in Southern France containing thirty-two-thousand-year-old cave paintings. As his camera pans over the rough-hewn horses, reindeer, rhinos, and bison, these animals appear to be galloping, thanks in part to their creators' ingenious use of the undulations of the cave walls to create the illusion of movement as well as to Herzog's ingenious use of 3-D. That there are layers of these creatures, painted by Paleolithic nomads over the course of some two thousand years, makes them all the more breathtaking. You are looking at art; you are looking at time; you are looking at something difficult to apprehend from your fixed position in the twenty-first century. With his trademark goofy gusto, Herzog interviews lab-coated scientists in a room filled with computers that provide stratigraphic analyses and laser scans to map every inch of the cave. He is fascinated by the scientists' scrutiny of the layers of paint that has allowed them to determine which of the paintings were done by the cave artist missing one finger (he was prolific) and which of the paintings were done thousands of years later. But he's just as interested in hearing about the dreams of one of these scientists, in which he wakes up inside the cave with the bones of saber–toothed tigers. He's also interested in this particular scientist's former career as a unicyclist (and encourages, one might even say incites, digressions in his interviews). Scientific facts? Yes, up to a point, but Herzog's not an expert and that non-expert vantage point is the one from which he wants his audience to regard these cave paintings. He wants you to wander off with him to consult the former president of the French Society of perfumers, who roves around mountainsides, sniffing for cave vapors -- this passionate sniffing is part of the experience of the cave paintings, too. His stance stubbornly resists infiltration by expertise; he protects the cave from an avalanche of scientific data. By doing this, he opens up the space at the center of the cave and that space is where a generative mystery may flourish. 'What constitutes humanness?' he asks a group of archaeologists. As Herzog's camera waltzes you around the cave (to eye-rollingly melodramatic music but, whatever, it's all part of the Herzogian experience), you follow his lead and you find yourself thinking, what does constitute humanness? Who are those cave painters? Who am I? What is the soul? What is art? Herzog dances you into this state of awe; dances you into a state of innocence."