Heart of Glass is an experimental film for which director Werner Herzog had the entire cast, except for the actor playing a seer (and real-life glass blowers appearing in the film), hypnotized before each shooting. Werner Herzog was born Werner Stipetic on September 5, 1942 in Munich. ...
Plot synopsis, according to dvdfile.com:
The film is a fable about a 19th Century Bavarian village whose chief glassmaker has died without passing on the secrets of his Ruby Glass, which is the town's biggest source of income and seems to be the symbolic life center that holds everyone together. Without it, the community starts to fall apart and the people slip into madness. The superstitious master of the glasswork factory becomes desperate and tries to convince a local prophet (portrayed by the only actor not hypnotized) to help him, but this seer has only visions of collapse and apocalypse.
As is frequently the case with Herzog's famously extreme shooting methods, the director casts his net into the primordial gloop and brings up a slow but beautifully shot and eerily toned vision of mass hysteria set amid the magnificent landscapes of pre-industrial Bavaria.
Working from Herbert Achternbusch's adaptation of a German folk tale, a small village is renowned for its ruby glass.
When the chief glassblower dies without revealing how the glass is imbued with its mysterious properties, the villagers succumb first to depression and then to collective madness.
The firm and thus the town are plunged into crisis when glass expert Muhlbeck dies, taking with him the secret of the firms renowned ruby glass. The impact upon bosses and workers alike is a mood of desolate, terminal, dejection.
Combining aspects of gothic horror movie, weird fairytale and crazy comedy, Heart of Glass is a way-out bit of seventies experimental cinema thats also a wildly over-ambitious chronicle of a nations history, art and philosophy nothing less than an attempt to analyse the essence of Germanys tortured soul.
Heart of Glass clearly isnt like anything else and this may not necessarily be a good thing.
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