In director Werner Herzog's most conceptual and perhaps most challenging film, HEART OF GLASS, a small Bavarian town is plunged into a mysterious and haunted despair when the owner of the town's preindustrial glass factory dies, failing to pass on the secret formula for its special ruby-colored glass. The aesthetic and narrative paths merge as the film leads viewers deep into the hypnotic and at times gothic plight of the workers and townspeople who stumble through the town, mesmerized and dazed, verging on murder and madness.
Herzog sets the tone not only with the highly stylized performances of his actors, who were actually hypnotized, but also by his signature attention to landscape and ethereal environments, creating a mystical plane of unreality. Vistas of fog-ensconced gothic landscapes merge hypnotically with magical interior scenes of premodern glassblowing as Herzog's evocatively absurd melodrama plays out its somnambulant trajectory toward a slow and submerged climax in which art and life collide in a symbolic and allegorical spectacle.
When the residents of a preindustrial German village lose the secret of making their unique ruby glass, the townspeople turn to madness, murder, and magic in a desperate effort to recover the pure ingredient they have lost.
In order to create, in Werner Herzog's words, "an atmosphere of hallucination, of prophecy and of the visionary," the director hypnotized his cast before shooting scenes.
DVD Features:
Region 1
Keep Case
Anamorphic Widescreen - 1.66
Letterbox - 1.66
Audio:
Mono - German
Subtitles - English - Optional
Additional Release Material:
Trailers
Audio Commentary: Werner Herzog - Director, Norman Hill
Interactive Features:
Interactive Menus
Scene Access
Text/Photo Galleries:
Production Notes
Biographies: Werner Herzog - Director
Costume Designer
Gisela Storch:
Director of Photography
Jorg Schmidt-Reitwein:
Production Designer
Cornelius Siegel:
Production Designer
Henning von Gierke:
Costume Designer
Ann Poppel:
Review 1:
"...With its magnificently shot imagery of mist-shrouded mountains and waterfalls, Herzog's film is like a Friedrich painting sprung to life..."
Source: Sight and Sound
p.63 11/01/2002
Review 2:
"...Mysteriously lovely..."
Source: New York Times
p.10 10/01/1977
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