Hacker Cinema
Heart of Glass
Herz aus Glas
1976 · Film · 94 min
Directed by Werner Herzog
A small Bavarian village is renowned for its "Ruby Glass" glass blowing works. When the foreman of the works dies suddenly without revealing the secret of the Ruby Glass, the town slides into a deep depression, and the owner of the glassworks becomes obssessed with the lost secret.
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2 comments on Hacker News
The aforementioned Lessons of Darkness is obligatory, but as I said, it is less a documentary than a kind of audiovisual poem. The footage is incredible [1].
Of his "straight" documentaries, Encounters at the End of the World is great. It's a film about the people who live at McMurdo Station in Antarctica. Like his other biographical documentaries, it mixes quirky people and humour with brutally realist view of the world, all to great photography and music.
The Fire Within [3], his 2022 documentary on the popular volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft, is wonderful. It's a superior companion piece to his earlier films about volcanos (Herzog really likes volcanoes), Into the Inferno and La Soufriere.
Of his fiction films, you can't avoid Aguirre, Wrath of God or Fitzcarraldo. But a personal favourite of mine among his 1970s films is Heart of Glass [4], a quirky and beautiful retelling of a Bavarian folk tale, set in the 1700s.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHfVnM_duRg
[2] https://letterboxd.com/film/encounters-at-the-end-of-the-world/
[3] https://letterboxd.com/film/the-fire-within-requiem-for-katia-and-maurice-krafft/
[4] https://letterboxd.com/film/heart-of-glass/
also this:
> Notable people who have discussed chicken hypnotism:
> - Werner Herzog. "known to hypnotize chickens; he also hypnotized the cast of his 1976 film Heart of Glass"
I wanna watch this movie now.
From the movies own wikipedia article:
> During shooting, almost all of the actors performed while under hypnosis. [...] The hypnotized actors give very strange performances, which Herzog intended to suggest the trance-like state of the townspeople in the story. Herzog provided the actors with most of their dialogue, memorised during hypnosis. However, many of the hypnotised actors' gestures and movements occurred spontaneously during filming.