HEART OF GLASS Movie Review

Herz aus Glas

One of the pictures that best typifies the characteristically outrageous showmanship of Werner Herzog's early career is his bizarrely compelling, quite demented portrait of a small German town that—at some undetermined point in the “pre-industrialized past”—loses the secret for making a unique form of glass. That's pretty much the plot, but the movie's genuine power comes from its stylized, operatic imagery, which Herzog has said was designed to convey an atmosphere of “hallucination and collective madness.” To ensure this effect, as well as to provide a high-toned gimmick for getting the film noticed on the festival circuit, Herzog claimed that the entire cast of the film was hypnotized during production, so that any critic who described Heart of Glass as “hypnotic” wouldn't just be whistling Dixie. To reinforce his goal of depicting collective madness, Herzog tried—at the Telluride Film Festival screening I attended—to hypnotize the entire audience prior to the screening. Though he was restrained from doing so by Festival officials, I suppose there's nothing to stop you from hypnotizing yourself prior to watching it on tape. But since Heart of Glass actually is mesmerizing enough all by itself, my advice remains the same: kids, don't try this at home.

NEXT STOP … Fata Morgana, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Vernon, Florida

1974 93m/C GE Josef Bierbichler, Stefan Guttler, Clemens Scheitz, Volker Prechtel, Sonia Skiba; D:Werner Herzog; W:Werner Herzog, Herbert Achternbusch; C:Jorge Schmidt-Reitwein; M:Popul Vuh. VHS NYF, FCT