Heart of Glass: Herzog's Hypnotised Cast

There is one fact about Heart of Glass that has swallowed the film whole, and it is the first thing anyone tells you: Werner Herzog put nearly his entire cast under hypnosis and shot them that way. The anecdote has travelled further than a single frame of the 1976 picture ever did. It gets repeated in profiles, in podcast intros, in the two-line summaries that precede repertory screenings, and it arrives pre-loaded with a verdict — the mad German did a mad thing, isn’t that mad.

The trouble with the anecdote is that it turns a real film into a stunt, and the stunt is the least interesting thing here. What matters is the question nobody asks after telling the story: what did the hypnosis actually put on screen, and is the resulting film any good? Fifty years on, those are answerable questions, and the answers are stranger than the trivia.

The legend underneath

The story comes out of the Bavarian Forest, the wooded upland along the old Czech border where glass has been made for centuries. A village lives off a glassworks. The works lives off one product: a ruby glass of extraordinary quality, the formula for which was known to a single master craftsman. That master has died without telling anyone, and the film opens in the vacuum left behind.

Everything that follows is a study of a community that has lost the one thing it knew how to do. The factory owner tears his father’s house apart looking for the recipe. The workers wait. The village drifts. And Hias, a herdsman and seer who lives out on the mountain with his cattle, watches it all and prophesies, in flat declarative sentences, the catastrophe that is coming for all of them.

Herzog wrote the script with Herbert Achternbusch, the Bavarian writer and filmmaker whose own work lives in the same register of deadpan regional strangeness. The prophecy material draws on the folk tradition of the Waldprophet, the forest seer, a figure with real currency in Bavarian storytelling. This is a film about apocalypse folklore made in the region that produced it, which is a meaningfully different proposition from an outsider borrowing peasant imagery for atmosphere.

What the hypnosis was for

Here is the part the anecdote gets wrong. Herzog did not hypnotise everyone. Josef Bierbichler, who plays Hias, performed unhypnotised throughout — the seer had to remain outside the condition afflicting everyone else, which is the entire structural logic of the film. The professional glassblowers, who spend the picture handling molten glass at temperatures that would take your hand off, were also left alone, for reasons that require no explanation.

Everyone else — the villagers, the factory owner, the servants, the drinkers in the inn — was hypnotised before takes. Herzog conducted the induction himself, having taught himself the technique, and then directed people under trance to speak lines, cross rooms, and hold objects.

The intent was not performance enhancement. Herzog was after a specific visual quality: a whole community that looks asleep while awake. He wanted the audience to watch a village sleepwalk toward its own destruction and to feel that the sleepwalking was literal. On that narrow objective, the technique delivers. The faces in this film have a slackness you do not see elsewhere. Eyes track a beat late. Sentences arrive with the stresses in the wrong places, as though each word were being lifted individually out of a box. Bodies stand at angles nobody chooses on purpose. It is genuinely unlike any other acting in cinema, because it is not acting.

The honest case against is easy to make and I will make it: it also drains the film of the thing performance normally provides, which is somewhere for the eye to rest. There is no one inside these people. The film asks you to watch a feature’s length of unoccupied faces, and a considerable number of viewers find that an hour and a half of tedium dressed as profundity. That reaction is not stupid. It is the direct cost of the method, and Herzog paid it knowingly.

Why it works when it works

The film survives its own experiment because of two elements that have nothing to do with hypnosis.

The first is Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein’s photography. He shot the interiors by firelight and window light, and the glassworks sequences carry an orange furnace glow against near-black that reads less like a set than a Georges de La Tour painting that has learned to move. The landscape material is the other half — Herzog opens on Hias in a high meadow watching a sea of cloud pour over a rim of mountain, then cuts to waterfalls, some of it manipulated in speed until water stops behaving like water. These passages have no narrative function whatsoever. They exist to establish that the natural world in this film is doing something enormous and indifferent while the humans below fret about a recipe.

The second is Popol Vuh. Florian Fricke’s group scored most of Herzog’s major work of this period, and the Heart of Glass music is among their finest: choral drones, a lot of space, a sense of ritual conducted by people who have forgotten what it was for. Cut the score and the film falls apart, because the score is what tells you the vacancy on screen is sacred rather than merely empty. It is the same trick Zdeněk Liška pulls in the Czech films of the era — the music supplies a coherence the images refuse to.

The cross-reference worth making is to Herzog’s own Even Dwarfs Started Small, made six years earlier. Both films seal a community inside a location, remove the possibility of rescue, and watch what people do when the ordering principle of their world has failed. Even Dwarfs answers with riot. Heart of Glass answers with sleep. They are the same enquiry conducted at opposite temperatures, and watching them in sequence tells you more about Herzog than any interview.

The other ancestor is the Central European tradition of political constraint metabolised into dream imagery — the current running through Valerie and Her Week of Wonders and, in a very different key, through Fantastic Planet. Herzog was not working under censorship, so his version of that grammar is elective. He chose the trance the way his eastern contemporaries were pushed into it.

The folk-horror question

Heart of Glass has been quietly absorbed into the folk-horror conversation over the last decade, and the fit is imperfect in a way that repays thinking about. It has the landscape, the isolated community, the collapse of a rational order into something older, the prophet nobody heeds. What it lacks is a supernatural agent. Nothing is hunting these people. There is no god in the wood, no coven, no bargain.

The horror here is purely economic and psychological: a village that knew one thing, forgot it, and could not survive the forgetting. Set that beside The Wicker Man, released three years before, and the difference is instructive. Summerisle has a functioning belief system that consumes an outsider. Herzog’s village has a vacated belief system that consumes itself. If the folk-horror revival wants an ancestor for its bleakest register, this is a better candidate than most of the films usually named — the long road traced in folk horror’s long road from The Wicker Man to Midsommar runs closer to this valley than the canon admits.

Where it sits

The film was restored some years ago and circulates on disc through the Herzog collections, and it screens with reasonable regularity in repertory programmes devoted to New German Cinema. It is not the entry point to Herzog. Come to it after Aguirre, after Nosferatu, once you already trust him enough to sit still for a film that has deliberately removed its own pulse.

Watch it late, alone, with the sound up so Popol Vuh can do its work. Do not fight the vacancy. The film is asking you to spend its whole length among people who have lost the thread, and the discomfort you feel is the film working rather than failing. Whether that is an experience you want is the only real question, and it is a fair one.

Spoilers below

The factory owner’s descent is the engine. Unable to find the formula, he moves from searching to theorising, and the theory he lands on is that the ruby glass required blood. Once a man has decided that his livelihood depends on blood, the film’s remaining moves are grimly legible. He murders the servant girl Ludmilla, and the murder buys him nothing — no formula, no glass, no reprieve. He burns the works down. The one asset the village had left goes up because its owner could not tolerate not knowing.

Hias sees all of it in advance and says so, in the flat voice of a man reading a timetable, and the saying changes nothing. He is the only unhypnotised presence in the frame and the only one who understands, and his understanding is completely inert. That is Herzog’s bleakest joke and the film’s real subject: prophecy as a form of helplessness. The seer is not a hero. He is a man condemned to watch.

Then comes the coda, which arrives from nowhere and is the best thing in the film. Herzog cuts away from Bavaria entirely to a rock in the Atlantic — the Skellig islands off the Irish coast — and to a group of men who believe the world ends at the horizon, that the sea simply stops. They get into a boat and row out anyway. The film ends on them going.

Nothing in the narrative prepares you for this. It is not an explanation, and it is not a consolation. It is Herzog placing, next to a village that destroyed itself rather than face an unknown, a handful of men who face the unknown with nothing but a rowing boat and a wrong idea about geography. The glassworks burned because its owner could not bear a mystery. The Skellig men set out into the mystery. The film gives its last image to them, and it declines to say whether they made it.