Director-writer-narrator Werner Herzog’s documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams is released both in 2D and 3D. With sturdier battery-operated glasses the latter format seems less eye-wearying than usual and, aside from one spear thrust, does not depend on the fad’s excesses. Indeed, the extra dimension enhances understanding of and appreciation for Middle Paleolithic hunters’ (contemporary with Neanderthals) skill in adapting water-carved stone surfaces to their charcoal sketches of Europe’s Ice Age fauna.

The natural feature is 1,300-foot-long Chauvet Cave, named for one of three scientists to re-discover it a week before Christmas Day 1994 and kept pristine by a sealing landslide twenty millennia ago. At thirty thousand years, some of its several hundred black-outline or –shaded representations of at least thirteen species -- paleozoologists here learned that male cave lions had no manes -- are roughly twice as old as any other known examples. Apart from museums’ female figurines called “Venuses,” the most famous of such hundred-fifty sites were discovered by accident --Spain’s pintura rupestre Altamira in 1879 and France’s Lascaux in 1940 -- decorated a mere fifteen thousand years back, and now closed to prevent further deterioration from human presence.

Access to Chauvet has been severely restricted in the interests of preservation and of health as well, levels of carbon dioxide and radioactive radon gas making it hazardous after a couple hours. With even certified researchers limited to parts of two spring months, filmmakers had been denied permission until Herzog was allowed to enter in 2010 with limited equipment and a versatile crew of three others -- as a Ministry of Culture employee with a taxable salary of one Euro.

The best part of the ninety-minute runtime is the cameras’ caressing the vital paintings of animals that wrap around curves of walls and even a stalactite that impart a sense of pre-cinema movement through devices such as extra sets of legs. Careful attention will notice that individual features or clusters are repeated, often several times, and that, archaeologist-curator Dominique Baffier underlines, man or woman is virtually unrepresented. “Virtually,” because the reverse of one restricted-access calcium icicle (filmed with a camera mounted on a pole) depicts a female-animal union; and because a crook-pinkied artist did a pattern of ochre handprints near the entrance and at points deeper in, the only color as distinct from later work in other caves.

Obsessive Herzog is best when projecting onto the tenaciously obsessive, as with Klaus Kinski in Aguirre: The Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, but does not know where to draw the line for himself. Overvoiced in English, commentator-participants are useful, perceptive, tentative, modest and humorous at their own expenses. Stock-German-accented English belying Duquesne University and US television and NASA jobs, Herzog’s pontifical narrative style is a negative, and, worse, his bald assertions about our unknowable precursors, the spiritual concerns that supposedly link us, and even about some Postscript future with albino alligators, are presumptions with which few historians would concur.

More succinctly and effectively, Picasso -- whose drawings merge man and animal, notably woman and bull -- linked painting magic as humans’ mediator with a strange hostile environment, as a seizing of primal power through giving form to man’s terrors and desires.

Patricio Guzmán also considers the past-present-future continuum, but, while arguably a stretch, his subtitled Spanish narration is easily the preferable of the two, and his current Nostalgia for the Light does not descend to the level of loudening (primitive and modern) heartbeats in underground silence.

Such allegories or idols of the cave should remain speculative. Nevertheless, for all the auteur’s heavy-handedness, Cave of Forgotten Dreams visuals alone are invaluable. Primitive painters’ dreams are forever beyond us, but as less opinionated others point out in context, we can bring into play the uniquely Homo sapiens gift of imagination. And the beauty of the pre-history artwork, available onscreen for want of any other alternative, is the wonder here, beyond film and ego.

(Released by IFC Films and rated "G" for general audiences.)