THE director Werner Herzog remembers being about 12 years old when he saw, and was transfixed by, a picture of a horse on the cover of a book about Paleolithic art, displayed in the window of a bookstore in the isolated Bavarian village where he lived. Ever since, even as he was making films like “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” and “Nosferatu,” that image “has engaged me and haunted my mind,” he said. “It has never left me.”

But it took more than 50 years after that first exposure to prehistoric cave art for Mr. Herzog to be able to act on his childhood fascination. In the spring of 2010 he was allowed to film in the Chauvet cave in southeastern France, where archaeologists have found exquisite wall paintings some 32,000 years old, the oldest ever discovered, and the result is an 90-minute documentary called “Cave of Forgotten Dreams.”

Shot in 3-D, “Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” which opens in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles on Friday, is, at least in Mr. Herzog’s view, an attempt to address a mystery and offer a glimpse into a world that 21st-century man can never hope to understand. Despite that, he wants the spectator to share the sense of childlike wonder he felt when he saw woolly rhinos, mammoths, bison, lions and horses staring at him from the walls of the Chauvet cave.

“There is a certain strange, palpable power from these images, and it’s not only that the paintings are so accomplished,” Mr. Herzog, 68, said in an interview in New York this month. “There is something that touches us instantaneously, something that is completely awesome. What you are witnessing is the origin of the modern human soul and the beginning of figurative representation.”