The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

The foreman of a small village glassworks dies without revealing the secret to the famous "Ruby Glass".This is very much a Werner Herzog film. Although the plot itself is interesting, and allows us to see a small village collapse in on itself because f its failure to diversify its economy, it really is not about the plot at all. It is a collection of unusual characters -- and sometimes just strange faces -- that make up Herzog's world. Not having been to Germany, I can't say, but I suspect his view and the real world are very much in opposition! What lessons are we to draw from this film? I have no idea. I mean, you know, besides the idea that it's important to write things down in case of our untimely demise!

Directed by Werner Herzog, "Heart of Glass" is set in an 18th century Baravarian town. Here villagers go about their business like brainwashed zombies, everything they deem important a mere half-thought (re)action provoked by tradition, routine, religion and biology. Director Werner Herzog hypnotised his cast so as to engender this effect. As "Heart of Glass" progresses, it becomes clear that these villagers depend on a local glass factory. This factory provides them with money, work, meaning and purpose. But when the Master of the glass factory dies, the villagers are left confused. The Master which they have defined themselves in relation to, has been torn away. All meaning gone, the very framework of their lives destroyed, the villagers begin to panic and go insane. A deeply existential film, Herzog's factory thus becomes what psychoanalysts tend to call a Master Signifier; the order of Law and Language, an invisible framework or ordering force which fixes the field of all meaning. And as with all Master Signifies (church, religion, God, daddy, state, money, kings etc), as the Master has a constituent lack, and is it in a sense totally arbitrary, it can only guarantee its own importance through arbitrary and ungrounded violence. Worse still, to kowtow to this Signifier produces a certain psychosis. The Signifier orders reality and its subjects - who define themselves under its imagined gaze - but this ordering is entirely arbitrary.Unsurprisingly, Herzog treats glass as a divine object with a holy glow and an almost mystical power. The glass workers are blue collared clergymen, and their dead Master a papal figurehead whom they believe to possess mystical wisdom. "How do we make glass now that the Master is dead?" the villagers wonder. "Only the Master knows the secret formula," one mournfully says. The divine cocktail which allows the glass to flow has been lost. Without it there is only chaos. A darkness enters the village.Late in Herzog's film, a sad eyed woman plays with a glass cup, its holy glow washing across her face. She says it reminds her of a church...before she is startled and drops the glass cup to the floor. The holy object shatters upon impact. "There is more to break today," a voice sounds from behind her. It is a prophet called Hias, a local who lives in the wilderness and has visions, all of which eventually come to pass. The world is ending, Hias says, a line which echoes the apocalyptic ruminations of Herzog's "Lessons of Darkness" and "Encounters at the end of the World".Hias foretells a collapse of all meaning, of all moral frameworks, an existential collapse which will lead to widespread anxiety. The villagers refuse to believe this. Instead they come to him with tales of a demon giant which kills their animals and tears trees from their roots. But Hias brushes these tales aside. The realm of the supernatural is gone. The monster is merely an optical illusion, the giant a shadow of a lowly dwarf.The villagers can't fathom this. Like the cultic founders of some medieval religion, they decide that the Master must have hidden the formula somewhere in the village. And so they tear the town apart looking for "truth", for "order", for some quasi-religious scripture, until, in a mad frenzy, they sacrifice an innocent local girl, thinking that her blood holds the key to making the holy glass. When the blood ingredient proves futile, the villagers turn on Hias. He is a demon, they now believe, who has brought this cataclysm upon them! Hias is chased out of the village.The future of mankind's "soul" – perhaps also Herzog's - is now on the line. Hias thus goes off into the wilderness and is forced to confront an invisible bear. He wrestles this invisible, superstitious being, and eventually wins; man has beaten myth. And so in a kind of Nietzschean triumph, God is suddenly dead. With this comes the birth of the new Herzog and the new world. How to survive this new world? Asceticism, perhaps. Director as Ascetic, film as penance, as trial in the name of the God that is art. "Thou shalt lift boat above mountains in the name Celluloid," Herzog hears, the director flagellating himself for the new Lord of the screen. Maybe. Maybe not."Heart of Glass" then ends with its best sequence, a parable about Irish monks living on a remote rock in the middle of the ocean. The monks stand on this craggy rock, at the edge of the world, daring God to make himself known. Finally they set off on boats to test their beliefs: is the world flat, they wonder, and does it end in an abyss? Is man forever on the precipice, or is there hope out there in the beyond? We recall the final moments of Herzog's "The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser", and we weep.8.9/10 – Masterpiece. Multiple viewings required.

Werner Herzog's "Heart of Glass" is a beautiful film, yet certainly not intended simply for popular audiences, and it aptly deserves the title of "art-house film". Which other film have you seen recently – or ever – in which most of the cast have been hypnotised so as to portray characters haunted and falling into despair (and, I should add, over something as trivial as losing the formula to make ruby-coloured glass)? Herzog also intertwines the film with long scenes that don't truly add much to the narrative yet create a sense of ambiance and mood. One scene shows working scenes of professional glass-blowers (who are some of the only characters not under hypnosis – obviously that would be dangerous!), and several others evoke Casper David Friedrich's "Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog", in which the soothsayer Hias sits and observes the beauty of nature. These long scenes – edited from clips of Bavaria, Yellowstone National Park and Ireland – are certainly beautiful, and I could imagine that they would be incredible when blown up on a proper cinema screen. These quasi-documentary scenes are certainly the best in the film, and overall add to a greater sense of Brechtian Verfremdung (defamiliarisation), encouraging the viewer not to get lost in the story but to think critically on the whole piece.Yet the experimental nature also does disservice to the film. The pace is slow, which is fine for the quasi-documentary scenes, but the hypnotised cast don't really help to speed things up at all in the narrative segments. Their behaviour is interesting to watch, but the defamiliarisation used here is just too experimental for its own good. "Heart of Glass" is very beautiful yet can be somewhat boring in parts, and it would be worth seeing with that in mind.

German filmmaker Werner Herzog is not an artist to be underestimated, even in his lesser films, like 1976's Heart Of Glass (Herz Aus Glaus) because his films tend to have a cumulative power, in that they get better with each successive viewing. OK, technically, the films are the same, but because they are so dense, layered, and multifarious, an appreciation and understanding of them is almost inevitable with a second or third viewing- one of the benefits that foreign films, and films with DVD commentaries afford and reward viewers with. The film in the Herzog canon this most reminds me of is his Even Dwarfs Started Small, another film that is so 'out there' it holds a fascination over the viewer, even if it fails to achieve greatness, or even coherence.Heart Of Glass combines the quirkiness of Even Dwarfs Started Small with the somnambulism of Night Of The Living Dead, the landscapes of the fictive Lord Of The Rings trilogy (albeit without the benefit of any special effects), and the period eye level realism of Herzog's own The Enigma Of Kaspar Hauser. The oft-repeated legend behind the film, propagated relentlessly by the notoriously tall tale telling Herzog, is that he personally hypnotized the whole cast, and one can almost believe it, given the leaden, faraway way the actors recite their lines. Yet, the film veers between this living cross between a marionette show and Noh theater and stunning musical interludes featuring the gorgeous landscapes (mountains, clouds, and waterfalls) of Bavaria and Alaska, often shot through gauzey filters that render the natural imagery as almost moving paintings upon a canvas; one designed to likewise lull the viewer into a mesmerized state. It is also like crossing mime with MTV music videos, only without having to laugh…. As usual, the music in the film, from the opening yodeling, to what seems to be monastic chanting, to the playing of a hurdy-gurdy, is excellent, and arranged by Popol Vuh's Florian Fricke. The cinematography, by Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein, as mentioned, is stunning, and many aspects of this film- from that cinematography, to certain odd sequences, such as a 'bar fight' between Wudy and Ascherl, where they break glass steins and pour beer over one another, or a later scene where Wudy dances with Ascherl's corpse, just lodge jaggedly in one's psyche, which show that the hypnotizing of the cast was something more than a mere 'gimmick' to sell the film. Also of note, in the cast, is an early Herzog cast regular, the dwarfish Clemens Scheitz, as the Master's man-servant, Adalbert. Thus, the film falls into that class of art beyond a good or bad axis, and onto one that is simply 'interesting' or 'worthwhile,' for it is not a masterpiece- as it is too unstructured and narratively anomic, nor is it a bad film- as it is too laden with great images and jaggedly lodged moments.Heart Of Glass is a film that seems to call out for critical dissection, even as such a task would rob the film of its ineffable power, such as poetic scenes of glassblowers attempting to replicate the Ruby Glass formula, or a scene of an ugly and retarded girl named Paulin dancing topless on a table with a duck that seems to have the beak wattle of a chicken or turkey. there is nothing that prepares one for such an image, but once it has been unreeled, there is no putting the proverbial genies back in the glass. That Heart Of Glass is only 94 minutes long is both a good and bad thing: good, for the tedium of some of the somnambulism bores, and bad, for the images could hold one's fascination for hours- sort of like Godfrey Reggio's –Quatsi films do, only even more powerful. Werner Herzog shows, in this film, that a great artist can still touch greatness in works that are not his best, but it is the fact that a film like this, clearly in the lower half of the Herzog canon, is still leagues better than all but the top ten or twelve films put out by the American film marketing machine which proves that Herzog's work will live as long as, or longer than, the many legends his masterful films retell.