Filmseminar Werner Herzog: "Herz aus Glas"

Ruby glass: The secret of its production is lost with the death of the master glassblower. The village gradually descends into confusion and madness, and the owner of the glassworks hires Hias, a seer from the mountains, to retrieve the production process for the precious glass from the realm of the dead. But Hias receives visions of destruction and madness - in the middle of a 19th century Bavarian village, he foresees the horrors of the 20th century.

The screenplay - by Herbert Achternbusch! - is based on the legends surrounding the fortune teller Mühlhiesl from the Bavarian Forest. Herzog reports that he hypnotized his actors (with the exception of Sepp Bierbichler), which lends their acting a strange stylization; the often mysterious dialogues were thus improvised under hypnosis. Herzog's staging establishes a metaphysically enraptured atmosphere that lends this film a suggestive beauty. Marcus Stiglegger on ikonenmagazin.de: "HERZ AUS GLAS is probably Herzog's most visually powerful etude - a film like the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich and Arnold Böcklin. [The film] rewards us with images that are only known in this visionary density from Eastern European cinema: perhaps from Tarkovsky and Klimov. [...] And Popol Vuh's ethereal sounds finally lift these impressions into an enraptured sphere."