The floor is covered with cave bear skulls and bones of other animals.  The stalagmites and stalactites are enormous and beautiful in the poor, false light.  But the art is extraordinary.  When you look up “Chauvet Cave” on Wikipedia, they say that there were only two periods when humans populated this cave because the cliff moved and destroyed the original, natural opening.  This fortunate turn of events also preserved the rock art in situ.  What I found most interesting is that my understanding of archeological work has been (from movies mostly) that things are taken away and studied, rarely put back, but displayed in museums.  It is a destructive, out of place, activity that doesn’t honor or respect the original site in many ways.

The work at Chauvet is quite different.  Although they have carbon-dated tiny pieces of charcoal, it remains largely intact.  Photographs and laser mapping are used to study this cave.  You’ll see how they do much of it in the film.  Enjoy!

Click here for the Freedom Riders documentary and click here for the Stonewall Uprising documentary.

Both of these events are seminal to my own consciousness raising as a White female from the South.  Watching the Freedom Riders withstand the beatings, jail, mobs, and law enforcement who stood by aimlessly, and finally Parchman Prison in Mississippi, I couldn’t help but wonder if I would have joined, had I been a little older.  And while I remember the Stonewall riots vaguely—that is, I remember them in the news—I wasn’t “out” in 1969.  It is doubtful that I would have participated in any way.  Still, I recognize the significance of each of these events.

I was completely unaware, for instance, that the Kennedys had their eyes on international affairs rather than on domestic ones and that the Freedom Rides really changed their point of view.   All I remember is the outcome of that:  The Civil Rights Act of 1963, John Kennedy’s eventual assassination, and Bobby’s following.  Hailed as heroes, they were reluctant ones in 1961.  The reluctance of Dr. Martin Luther King to join the Freedom Rides is one of those facts of history that was also hidden from my own reading until watching this movie.

I always thought the Stonewall Inn was a kind of high-priced, fancy gay bar; instead, it was mob-run, rundown, dark, and dreary.  However, like so many gay bars, it was the only place to go besides the trucks.  Ah, the trucks, where gay men went to have sex.  Before the baths.  Really?  It sounds so dreary and awful.  Lots of details in this documentary fill in the blanks of what it was really like in the 1950′s and 1960′s in and out of the bars.  When I came out, my friends were always afraid for me to go to the bathroom by myself.  They always accompanied me.  Now I know why!

These are revealing and interesting films, and I love it that PBS makes them available online once they’ve shown on TV.  Free!

I am reading Peter Appelbaum’s Children’s Books for Grown-Up Teachers (2008).  One of the ideas is that modern children have no trouble identifying with magical or enhanced humans or humanized animals.  All of the Chronicles are filled with animals that communicate, that fight, that befriend, all exhibiting human traits.  The line between human and animal is blurred.  The technology of magical swords is at the heart of this episode in the Chronicles, necessary within the epic challenge between Good and Evil.

The hidden curriculum of C. S. Lewis seems to be that if one resists temptation, Evil is banished, even if it takes a huge fight with a shape-shifting sea monster hidden in a green mist on an island to nowhere.  I always recommend reading the books before seeing the movies, but even if you saw the movie first, go read the books.  Your imagination will fill in where cinematography stops.