On 2010-01-29 Caraculiambro, La Mancha and environs wrote: Well, I´m a Herzog completist, so I am nearly done with my quest of collecting and watching all his movies. There´s only a couple of I haven´t seen, and those are shorts.
This one is from Herzog´s early phase. Its plot concerns a small town in Bavaria whose economy is based on a unique method of glass-blowing. When the last one to possess this secret dies, the economy collapses and the town descends into madness. It´s not a documentary.
The movie is famous for the following unusual directing technique: nearly all of the principal actors were hypnotized before delivering their lines in nearly all of the scenes.
This is one of those ideas that must have worked better on paper than it did once it was in the can. I´m sure, while filming, Herzog was quite taken with himself and how art critics would swoon over this approach, but for me, what matters is the final result, not so much the story behind the final result.
Hence what we really have is a bunch of actors delivering their lines in dopey monotones. The whole thing would have been a lot better, I imagine, if Herzog had merely told those actors to act like they were hypnotized: this would have created the same eerie effect, but been more watchable.. And summed up by saying didn´t like it. Currently Heart of Glass has an overall rating of 6 over 10.
Heart of Glass can also be found in the following searches:
Starz / Anchor Bay claimed Heart of Glass - A small village is renowned for its ´Ruby Glass´ glass blowing works. When the owner of the works dies suddenly without revealing the secret of the Ruby Glass, his son tries to recreate it. In order to create the proper atmosphere of trance and sleepwalking, the entire case acted under hypnosis.
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