LGM Film Club, Part 522: Heart of Glass

Criterion had a Werner Herzog series last month and I was waiting for this because there are so many Herzog films I haven’t seen. Now, the thing about Herzog is that his work is wildly inconsistent. This is inherent to how he makes pictures, in similar ways to how this was true for Robert Altman or Sam Fuller. In the 21st century, he’s become the most interesting documentarian in the world, but before that, he was more known for his fictional films, which are crazy up and down. So I started watching some of these films knowing that they wouldn’t be super great and that’s how I felt about his 1976 film Heart of Glass. It’s a sort of Gothic horror that revolves around a town in 18th century German where the genius behind its ruby glass dies from unknown and perhaps supernatural reasons and the town is in a crisis since no one else knows how to make the glass the right way. That starts with the town’s resident nobility, who starts tearing things apart to figure it out.

But let’s not talk too much about the plot here, which is pretty thin in any case. If this film is noted for anything, it’s that Herzog had a lot of the actors put under hypnosis while making the film, which is certainly an unusual method. And some do look like they are just doing whatever they are being told to do in a mechanistic way. Roger Ebert loved the film, but I’m not sure why because it just doesn’t add up to anything at all, and it’s not as if Ebert had any answers here either, as you can see from that essay. The characters aren’t even really characters–obviously since they are under hypnosis. They aren’t archetypes either. They are just nothing. And that’s the point of the film–we are all nothing. Which is very Herzogian. So if you an atmospheric Herzog that leans way into some of his obsessions, you are likely to enjoy this more than I did. I don’t regret watching it though, it’s fascinating for what it is.