Heart of Glass (1976)
A film that ostensibly concerns the death of a master glass maker who specialised in his creation of a Ruby Red glass. With him dies the secret to his creation, leaving behind a town worried about the loss of their livelihoods. But as with most Werner Herzog features, it’s about so much more.
The film is seemingly a study in death, change and the end to all things. Throughout we are greeted my memorable imagery; fog and mist running like a river over a landscape of hills and trees, a woman at a grave side, a cross in the foreground, and two men drinking and talking in heavy shadow over drinks, glass broken and beer poured over heads. A sort of mania, depression and occasional listlessness runs through the film.
It opens with a man called Hias, discussing and prophesying the end of time, everything crumbling, falling, tumbling over imagery of waterfalls. The town are suspicious, they fear giants, as though we have entered a land of myth or stories, but the prophet tells us the shadow of a dwarf creates the giant. As though the smallest of things grow to become the biggest nightmare.
Hias, Josef Bierbichler, is a prophet. He watches, he witnesses and he warns to no avail. He exists on the periphery of the town. At the start he mentions an end to mankind and a rebirth, the events and industry of the town and the loss of the formula for the red glass play out showing an end, a death.
What makes this incredibly unique is that Herzog had the majority of the cast, barring Bierbichler, hypnotised prior to the filming of their scenes. Everyone performs their dialogue slightly detached, it can appear as though they’re just reciting lines. They all act as though sleep walking, creating at times, an amateurish approach and at others a dream like state to affairs, a madness, an acceptance of the inevitable change. It’s maddening to witness but it compliments the insanity we watch unfold.
A grand, insane experiment that can confuse and confound but always fascinates.
A film that ostensibly concerns the death of a master glass maker who specialised in his creation of a Ruby Red glass. With him dies the secret to his creation, leaving behind a town worried about the loss of their livelihoods. But as with most Werner Herzog features, it’s about so much more.
The film is seemingly a study in death, change and the end to all things. Throughout we are greeted my memorable imagery; fog and mist running like a river over a landscape of hills and trees, a woman at a grave side, a cross in the foreground, and two men drinking and talking in heavy shadow over drinks, glass broken and beer poured over heads. A sort of mania, depression and occasional listlessness runs through the film.
It opens with a man called Hias, discussing and prophesying the end of time, everything crumbling, falling, tumbling over imagery of waterfalls. The town are suspicious, they fear giants, as though we have entered a land of myth or stories, but the prophet tells us the shadow of a dwarf creates the giant. As though the smallest of things grow to become the biggest nightmare.
Hias, Josef Bierbichler, is a prophet. He watches, he witnesses and he warns to no avail. He exists on the periphery of the town. At the start he mentions an end to mankind and a rebirth, the events and industry of the town and the loss of the formula for the red glass play out showing an end, a death.
What makes this incredibly unique is that Herzog had the majority of the cast, barring Bierbichler, hypnotised prior to the filming of their scenes. Everyone performs their dialogue slightly detached, it can appear as though they’re just reciting lines. They all act as though sleep walking, creating at times, an amateurish approach and at others a dream like state to affairs, a madness, an acceptance of the inevitable change. It’s maddening to witness but it compliments the insanity we watch unfold.
A grand, insane experiment that can confuse and confound but always fascinates.