A little late this week because I was out and about over the weekend. There's a show cavern a few hours away from my house that's been screening horror movies for October and when I saw they were going to have the 2005 cave-horror movie THE DESCENT on the schedule I bought a ticket immediately. They had rigged up some sort of inflatable screen in the largest 'cathedral' or 'ballroom' area of the cavern (where they also do an acoustic music series). The audience area was about as narrow as the space on board a typical domestic flight, with two folding chairs on either side of an aisle that was marked with electric tea-light candles.

If you've ever been into a tourist cavern, it's pretty typical that at some point your tour guide will turn off all the lights just to show you how utterly dark the cave is. They did this for the screening, so beyond the anemic little tea lights on the ground, the screen and the ambient glow of the back-projector behind it were the only sources of faint illumination. It was just enough that you could see the cave-wall textures of the movie extended all around.

The day after the screening, I stumbled across an article about a fascinating group in France called les UX who had secretly set up a full movie theater and bar in the Paris catacombs that was accidentally discovered by police in 2004. Werner Herzog's 2010 documentary CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS about the paleolithic paintings in the Chauvet Caves also comes to mind as another example of humans bringing light and art deep underground.

In a way, a modern movie theater is an artificial cave, so why not just use a real cave (or catacomb) to screen a movie? Not too far from the cavern that hosted the screening (maybe an hour's drive or so?) there's an old limestone quarry that's been used as an outdoor concert venue for decades now. It's not quite a natural amphitheatre, but it's a wonderful repurposing of what might otherwise be another abandoned industrial site.

I think these are all reminders to me of the ways humans make art in and with the environment. We make art that's entirely temporal like music and movies. We also make art that lasts for millenia and even myriads--cave paintings, carved figures, pottery, engravings, beads. We've always done it. I'm glad I've gotten to experience so much of it and I hope the future holds more.

That's all for now, and I hope you have a good one.

-Verdigristle 10.14.25