Watch Heart of Glass For Free

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

In the story of the breakdown of a small glassblowing factory in a Bavarian village around 1800, Werner Herzog's Heart of Glass sees the melancholy of communities depending on manufacture, the disconnectedness of people without a feeling of purpose. Dashed hopes and visions of a desolate future come in the guise of the soothsaying of a shepherd, who prophesizes in a hypnotic state. Stay with me here.This is one of the most legendary of Herzog's films, known as the one where most of the actors were put in trances for most of the scenes. It hasn't been seen much, maybe since it isn't to the predilection of most people. There's no orthodox story, no conclusion, and the final scene is an allegory apparently not related to anything that's gone before. The movie's like a piece of music, where everything is understood in terms of tone and ambiance.Herzog's panorama has two shots from the tops of peaks, looking down over the earth and the ocean. The rest of the movie is set in a few houses, a beer hall, a glass factory, and in the forest engulfing the village. The people rely on the manufacture of rose- colored glassware. The head glassmaker Muhlbeck has died, taking with him the secret of the glass. Reckless attempts are made to retrieve the formula, but all blunder. A sensible person might say the factory can make other kinds of glass. But there are no sensible people around here.The dialogue the actors perform under Herzog's hypnosis is delivered with a barren conviction. It lacks energy and identity. What if what we're really hearing are Herzog's own inflections as he hypnotized them and told them what to say? Is he acting through them? These are not really characters, though they have idiosyncrasies. They're people who have had their spirit taken from them by the deterioration of their work. It's a bleak life, but it's a purpose.The survivor of a drunken free-fall from a hayloft waltzes despairingly with his friend's corpse. People drink and stare. In a particularly memorable scene, one guy breaks a beer stein over another guy's head, who doesn't react. Then, he unhurriedly pours his own beer over the first one's head, again yielding no reaction. You can feel what Herzog is driving at. In reality, you don't break a mug over someone's head without some apparent rationale, but that's gratuitous for Herzog's intentions. He shows the animal texture of the two men fighting. They need no explanation. They're devoid of motivation, to fight or to live. They've been rendered into shells of despondency and bitterness. Some imagery works fine without literal interpretation. Heart of Glass seems to me to be such a piece of work. We may not quite know what it makes us think, but we know how it makes us feel.

I have struggled through a good dozen of Herzog's early films and am not too proud to admit that I simply do not get it. Detractors accuse his films of being slow and pretentious (a word I hate). I adore Tarkovsky, Bergman, Antonioni, Kieslowski - all of whom suffer the same slings and arrows from would-be cineastes - but I just can't get into Herzog at all. I certainly enjoyed some his films more than others ; The Enigma of Kasper Hauser, Nosferatu The Vampyre and, in particular, Woyzeck all have their moments for me.Heart of Glass is best known as the outcome of Herzog's most radical experiment; having most of the cast perform under hypnosis. Accused to this day of gimmickry, Herzog insists that this was done for the sake of "stylisation not manipulation" in order to add a trance-like aura to the characters' increasing insanity. Factoring in the fact that almost everyone in the film was a non-actor, what do you think the outcome was? Let me save you the suspense. The outcome, as far as I'm concerned, was that we get to watch 90 minutes of people in what appears to be a stoned, stupefied coma. This is confounded by the fact that the dialogue - if it can be so called - seems to be written in some trite haiku style. For the most part, nobody talks to anybody else, they simply recite this flowery, contrived poetry at each other. Half the time, the actors are not even looking at each other! At the risk of sounding incredibly shallow, most of the cast could also be contenders for the title of Ugliest Person Alive.Don't get me wrong, I like a film to be challenging, but there's a line and Herzog not only crossed it, he set fire to it and threw it out the window. There's nothing challenging about an old man in a chair randomly and unconvincingly cackling; or a naked, bald-headed woman holding a goose (yes, a goose) and staring into space; or two half-cooked men slowly pouring beer over each other; or a man sitting perfectly still looking at a hand of playing cards while madness ensues around him. This is considered half-arsed film-making if we're talking about people like Jess Franco, but somehow Herzog gets away with it.I'd love to sit down and watch this again with someone who likes it so I can ask them to point out what I'm missing.The most painful thing about this film is that, after 90 minutes of genuine suffering, there is very little payoff. Okay, I get it, Herzog is making a point about faith, despair, hopelessness and the fragility of humanity (the heart of glass). He could have done this just as effectively in ten minutes, this being about the collective total of the film's screen time which I would like to see again, as it contains some lovely cinematography (which has nothing to do with the rest of the film).This notwithstanding, the only reason I could recommend this film to anybody is for the sheer, baffling pointlessness and stupidity of it. Honesty, you really do have to see it to believe it.

I like the director Werner Herzog and have watched several of his movies. But I must confess that I totally did not like "Herz aus Glas" (Heart of Glass). I do speak German, but I learned it in the North, so I totally did not understand the Bavarian dialect people were speaking. That was not only my problem, the person I was watching it with grew up in Bavaria and didn't understand the plot or some of the dialog either. I don't know why Herzog decided to make it so hard to understand, was it intentional? I did not like the editing, I thought it was confusing. The actors were incredibly ugly, which was interesting in a paradox way... Where did they find these people? They look like they walked out of a picture of a peasant tavern from 17th century Holland! Because the film was so confusing and so darn boring, I would not recommend it. Visually it was beautiful, but that is not enough to make it a good film.

Werner Herzog has this unique ability in the impact his films have. All his films are a clash between realist presentation and extreme situations. Heart of Glass is Herzog at his most hyper-real. By hypnotising the majority of the cast and provoking them into hypnosis-induced improvisation, he has created an incredibly surreal film which is in itself hypnotic.Heart of Glass contains a lot of personal material for Herzog, given that its setting is the Bavarian countryside where he grew up, and its story and many of its themes are quintessentially Bavarian. But conversely this isn't purely some sentimental homage to the Bavarian way of life – it's actually very pessimistic and doom-laden, as is a lot of Herzog's work to be honest. Still, it is set against this Bavarian backdrop, and Herzog shows us the beauty of its landscapes and its vanishing ways of life with great reverence.The film is incredibly slow and still – there's a kind of serenity to it which is at odds with the confusion and mounting desperation of the characters. Unusually for him, Herzog keeps his camera still for most of the picture – allowing the action to flow in and out of the frame, giving us the feeling that we are passive observers of this chaotic nightmare that is unfolding before us. There's a lot of editing back and forth between events going on simultaneously, a bit like the tension-building cross cutting technique pioneered by D.W. Griffith, only with Herzog it's much, much slower. It still has this powerful effect though of showing the spread of mass hysteria through the village in which the action takes place.Famously Herzog hypnotised all but a few of his actors, and he managed to get some really good results out of them. I really recommend listening to Herzog's DVD commentary – even if you find the film itself boring – for some really fascinating insights into this. The leading professional actor, Josef Bierbichler (who was not hypnotised), also gives a really strong performance as the mythical shepherd and prophet Hias.The music, by regular Herzog collaborator Popol Vuh, is one of my favourite scores by that composer. He has clearly taken inspiration from Bavarian music and created this really warm and tender main theme to score the landscape shots, as well as an eerie melody for darker scenes.At first glance, this seems like a film that is about mood and texture above story, which is something I really despise. It's not though – all good directors use style and method to help convey a story. Herzog's stylisation is so extreme that often it overshadows the plot – but he does have respect for his story. Heart of Glass is a very strange film by a very strange director, and not one that is easy to watch, but it is a very beautiful and rhythmic work and, as I mentioned before, the commentary track alone is worth getting the DVD for.