Most recent reviews for Heart Of Glass

Boring

Teresa Mary Strate from Alderney, Channel Islands , 26/07/2007

Werner Herzog's films are usually hard to take. Most of them with mad and excruciating Klaus Kinski playing the head part, they are all quite exciting. This film is different. No Kinski, no fun! Although the pictures of Bavaria are most beautiful, I thought the film was quite dull. If you have a sleepless night, just watch this movie and you don't have to bother any more.

Bonkers

err from Llangadog , 22/02/2007

I love Herzog precisely because his films are always a bit nuts, but this one is almost completely beyond comprehension. I watched it twice and the second time I more or less laughed all the way through. The vague narrative is simple enough, but everything else is just bananas. I didn't expect a punchline, but the ending is superlative bathos, which is presumably just the point. Hats off to Herzog for making a simple tale incomprehensible and somehow gripping at the same time.

only werner herzog...

jason greensides from ealing, london , 09/08/2006

only werner herzog would hypnotise the majority of his cast for the purposes of a film. this is great, albeit slightly wierd, filmmaking from one of the craziest filmmakers around.

worth watching for the beautiful, enigmatic ending.

The directors commentary is also extremely illuminating.

herzgian bavarian

gavin jones from west wales , 09/07/2006

A deeply personal and expressionistic film about herzog's bavarian roots, heart of glass has the effect of instantly making anyone who watches it an outsider looking in. Clearly, as art in it's purest form, you find you cannot take your eyes from the hypnotised cast, looking into their eyes to try and see what they're seeing. I enjoyed it. By the way, don't miss the herzog commentary for his reasons for making the film the way he did.

Extraordinary

Savage from London, England , 02/05/2006

A unique film, and perhaps the summation of Werner Herzog's always-extreme vision of humanity: here symbolized by a small middle-European village facing ruin and disaster when they lose the secret of making their ruby glass. Without that, the lord of the village has nowhere to store his powdered blood and the villagers have no product to make. The absence of God - a main theme of almost all Herzog's films, from Aguirre to Cobra Verde - was seldom so clear. And to added to the brew here, we have one professional actor (the ever-excellent Josef Bierbichler), the rest of the cast being amateurs, and the one member of the cast not to by hypnotised, playing a visionary herdsman who predicts the end of the villager's world by fire. Interspersed through the film are further apocalyptic visions, and it culminates with a small tribe setting off across the horizon in a too-small boat, looking for the new world.

The film is difficult, nearly impossible to watch because of the hypnotised acting - which gives the picture an intensity which is genuinely unsettling - and because Herzog refuses to use anything like a conventional narrative structure. His themes and meanings must be teased out, and it will be very much a matter of individual taste as to whether it is worth the effort.

Very Odd

Stevieb47 from Surbiton , 09/10/2005

Heart of Glass (1976) - long been an admirer of German Visioniary/Madman Werner Herzog who has made some very odd films over the years.....and this is probably his oddest.Set in a rural village in Bavaria it tells the fate of the villagers when the supervisor of the glass factory dies and takes the secret of making the glass to the grave.A local herdsman who has the gift of prophesy foretells doom and destruction.....what makes it really odd is that Herzog had most of the cast hypnotised so the majority of the performances are given in a trance like state.......that said it has a eerie haunting quality and the final sequence set on a bleak craggy rock is extra-ordinary.

One of those films that you wish would end when you're watching it .......and you want to watch again as soon as it does.......go work that one out...

oh dear

A customer from Falkirk, Scotland , 07/10/2005

What on earth was that all about? Arthouse turned farthouse. This definately could have been a lot better, it's only saving grace was the artistic direction.

Heart of glass

A customer from Surrey , 26/09/2005

Pretentious, preposterous prittle-prattle right from the off. Don't bother - after trying for 20 mins, neither did I.

Wow

bobbyperu from Merseyside , 20/07/2005

Even by Herzog's standards, this is out there. Almost the entire cast were placed under hypnosis for the duration of making of this extraordinary film, which appears to be about a village driven mad trying to find out the lost secret of making a type of glass. This synopsis does little justice to such a magnificent achievement, which with its funereal pace (several moments are reminiscent of Tarkovsky) and totally inexplicable incidents will infuriate as many as it engages.

There is truly nothing like this film, even in Herzog's canon. This makes Aguirre or Fitzcarraldo look positively mainstream. Seasoned Herzog viewers and lovers of the utterly original will be delighted. What a film!

I put a spell on you

klauski from west sussex , 06/12/2004

Although not as successful as "Enigma of Kasper Hauser" or the extraordinary "Nosferatu", this movie is still well worth seeing. Herzog's characteristic visionary poetic cinema is very evident here, with a beautiful sense of haunting imagery and wonderfully atmospheric music from his usual band, Popol Vuh.

The film is slow and almost too stylised for its own good - Herzog was much more successful at combining his intensity of mood with a powerful narrative in his other works. Yet it does engage, and it is not too long - unlike one of its clear inspirations, "Andrei Roublev" which lasts more than 3 hours.

The commentary by Herzog is also well worth listening to, particularly with such an obscure film!