Werner Herzog’s Heart of Glass is best known for its unorthodox approach to direction: Herzog placed most of his actors under hypnosis in order to more convincingly depict an entire town falling under the sway of a gradual collective madness. Yet contrary to many of the auteur’s late-career projects, this high-concept device isn’t used as a mallet to hammer home pet theories or a bleak personal philosophy; it creates questions instead of answering them, functioning as a tool of expansion rather than one of reduction. Still deep in his ‘mystically-inclined seeker’ phase, the Herzog of 1976 turned his actors into dead-eyed drones to demonstrate their helplessness and detachment, a maneuver which ostensibly gave him total control over their performances while also leaving a lot up to chance. This mixture of control and chance helps establish the film’s textured, complex presentation of 18th century Bavaria, emphasizing its distance and mystery while also creating a strange sense of intimacy. Demonstrating his usual keen interest in documentary reportage, the director catalogues processes and behaviors, focusing on the execution of these activities rather than the people carrying them out, shaping a story less about individual humans than the overall structure of humanity, conveyed through an innate focus on labor and repetition.
This all occurs in the wake of a single, momentous death. The village glassmaker, solely in charge of the production of its famous rose-colored ruby glass, dies without giving anyone his formula. The town’s small population goes into shock, but Herzog’s wholesale erasure of facial expressions assures that the movie won’t be about their reactions. Instead, Heart of Glass evolves into a prolonged study of how a social group, portrayed here as a disordered, multi-limbed organism, breaks down once its central ordering principle is lost. Some turn to dissolution and drink, others to outright madness, while the factory owner goes to desperate lengths to figure out the formula and get things back on track. In a last ditch effort, he summons down from the mountains the itinerant shepherd Hies (Joseph Bierbichler), a supposed clairvoyant, but his visions aren’t helpful, predicting only doom.
Bierbichler was the only actor not hypnotized, and the clarity of his performance accentuates his prophetic isolation and importance to the narrative. Branded a lunatic, unjustly blamed for the town’s declining state, he’s also the only recognizably alive human face in a sea of sleepwalkers, bearing a message that seems pointed as much at the audience as at the other characters. Heart of Glasscame at an interesting juncture, addressing contemporary turmoil as it depicted a historical moment of social upheaval when the world of passed-down cultural knowledge gave way to an industrial revolution that stripped villages and built cities. Full of fire-and-brimstone visions of future disaster laid alongside contemplative scenes of nature at rest, the film matches the death of one way of life against the possible erasure of all humanity, the burgeoning potential of industrialization countered by its impending consequences.
Amid this apocalyptic aesthetic, fire becomes a recurring motif, a controlled substance whose enslavement can yield fantastic results, as seen in one extended glassblowing sequence. But it also destroys when it slips its bounds, as in a climactic scene in which the factory owner bears out the growing sense of hopelessness and sets fire to the entire town in a fit of despair. Such despair is a constant in Herzog’s movies, but Heart of Glass stands out as one of his most compelling interpretations of that condition, integrating an experimental approach into the usual existentialist strum-und-drang. Roger Ebert’s 2011 reappraisal notes one interesting function of the coached line readings: the inflection comes from Herzog himself, so he’s doing all the acting, his unadorned words pinging out into an echo chamber of his own making. Approximating a societal shift from a system of artisanal skilled labor into a world of machine-anchored factories, he turns his actors into automatons, mere tools used to bring his words to life, presented in drab, distressingly lifeless form.
The film’s general obscurity is capped off by its mysterious ending, shot on the desolate island of Skellig Michael where several unfamiliar characters stare off at the ocean. Despite having stripped away any recognizable remnants of the story’s already alien structure, this conclusion seems to signify hope, or at least the need to press on valiantly into unfamiliar terrain. As in many Herzog works, it calls to mind the lone visionary, seeing what others cannot, possessed with the spirit to fight against the callousness of nature and the cruelty of humanity. In most cases, this trope is exemplified via half-crazed characters functioning as reflections of the director himself. Heart of Glass contains no such central figure—its closest analogue coming in the form of a shabby iconoclast on the fringes of the story, who’s gone by the end of the narrative—but its sui generis approach to performance refracts those same ideas through a different lens, creating something that’s both singularly disquieting and breathtakingly unusual.