CITY Screen, York, is showing the first documentary film to be made in 3D, Werner Herzog’s Cave Of Forgotten Dreams (U).

For his follow-up to Encounters At The End Of The World, the German director gained unprecedented access through the tightest of restrictions to capture on film the interior of the Chauvet Cave in southern France with specially designed 3D cameras.

The world’s oldest cave paintings were discovered there in 1994, and Herzog’s cameras reveal a breathtaking subterranean world leading to the 32,000-year-old artworks.

They depict at least 13 different species, including horses, cattle, lions, panthers, bears, rhinos and even hyenas, and as the artists used techniques not often seen in other cave art, they making the Chauvet Cave an important record of Palaeolithic life in all of its savage detail.

Only a handful of researchers have witnessed the paintings in person, thanks to fear of damage from exposure to light and even human breath. Hence Herzog’s access was limited to a few hours per day and to a two foot-wide walkway, where he used battery-powered lights that emit no heat.

With director of photography Peter Zeitlinger, Herzog had to rebuild and design radical adaptations to the available 3D cameras. Overcoming setbacks and complications, not least a volcanic eruption, Herzog and his team endured several weeks of intense production in March and April 2010.

The resulting film’s initial one-week run at City Screen is being extended into a second week from today.

“In true Herzogian fashion, his hypnotically engaging narration weaves in wider metaphysical contemplations as we learn more about the Paleolithic art and its creators,” says the City Screen brochure.

“We are invited to reflect on our primal desire to communicate and represent the world around us, evolution and our place within it, and ultimately what it means to be human.”

Herzog’s film received investment from Picturehouse Entertainment and consequently it is being shown solely at Picturehouse cinemas such as City Screen, York.

“It’s an important and exclusive release for Picturehouse and the national newspapers have been giving it such superb reviews,” says City Screen marketing manager Dave Taylor.

He is equally enthusiastic. “The way in which the prehistoric artists followed the contours of the caves in their artwork makes Herzog’s use of 3D technology really meaningful,” says Dave.

A trailer can be seen online at YouTube. For tickets, phone 0871 902 5726 or picturehouses.co.uk

• CITY Screen, York, will broadcast Faithless’s farewell concert via satellite live from the sold-out London O2 Academy tonight. After 15 years, dance music pioneers Rollo Armstrong, Maxi Jazz and Sister Bliss will end their blissful nightlife with their Faithless: Pass The Baton show at 10.15pm.

The Faithless finale will be the first ever dance music event to be beamed by satellite to cinemas. The Brixton show will be filmed with the latest high-definition technology and broadcast at City Screen with 5:1 surround sound.

Announcing his group’s split, Maxi Jazz said: “We’ve had, with our fans, the most unbelievable, epic and moving experience, stretching over years and tens of thousands of miles. Joyful, exhilarating and empowering, we never for a moment thought an affair could last this long.”

• City Screen’s tribute to the late, great York film soundtrack composer John Barry will open on Sunday with a 5.30pm screening of Séance On A Wet Afternoon (PG). Fellow York composer Christian Vassie will introduce Bryan Forbes’s British psychological thriller from 1964, in which Kim Stanley plays Myra, a crooked, self-styled psychic who has become slightly unhinged since the death of her son.

Craving fame and fortune, she concocts a scheme with her weak-willed husband (Richard Attenborough) to kidnap a young girl and then use her “powers” to help the authorities find the girl.

To mark Barry’s death on January 30, two further films with his soundtracks will be shown: John Schlesinger’s triple Oscar-winning Midnight Cowboy (18) on April 17 at 8pm and Nicolas Roeg’s solo directorial debut, Walkabout (12A), on April 26 at 6.15pm.

In Midnight Cowboy, made in 1969, Jon Voight’s dim-witted Joe Buck arrives from Texas in New York City, dressed as a cowboy. He tries to live as a hustler and a gigolo, only for Dustin Hoffman’s Rico ‘Ratso’ to trick him and steal from him, but they then become allies against the society that rejects them.

Walkabout will be screened in a 40th anniversary digital restoration, its parable of noble savages and the crushed spirits of city dwellers starring Jenny Agutter and Luc Roeg as a teenage girl and her brother, stranded in the Australian Outback after their father’s suicide.

The orphaned children would not survive, however, without the aid of a young Aborigine (David Gulpilil) on his “walkabout”, a rite of passage that involves a ritualistic separation from his tribe by journeying into the wilderness alone.

For tickets, phone 0871 902 5726 or book online at picturehouses.co.uk

• Ken Loach’s Route Irish (15) is the Tuesday Special at City Screen, York, at 6.15pm.

The veteran British director casts Mark Womack and John Bishop (yes, the ubiquitous Liverpudlian comedian) as inseparable best friends Fergus and Frankie, who fought together in Iraq before returning as private security contractors – one of the most dangerous jobs in the world.

When Frankie is killed in suspicious circumstances, Fergus makes it his duty to bring the men responsible to justice, but soon he finds himself on a one-man mission for revenge that will head ever nearer chaos and self-destruction.