Product Details

• Actors: Josef Bierbichler, Thomas Binkley, Claude Chiarini, Janos Fischer, Gunter Freyse
• Format: Color, Subtitled, NTSC
• Subtitles: English
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: New Yorker Video
• VHS Release Date: January 1, 1998
• Run Time: 94 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 6302551730
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #333,518 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com essential video

In his tireless crusade to expand the vocabulary of cinema, Werner Herzog turned Heart of Glass into a bold and challenging experiment. By placing all but one of his actors under hypnosis, Herzog achieved his desired effect, eliciting performances that seem oddly detached and trancelike, perfectly appropriate to a story about 19th-century Bavarian villagers who have lost their collective vision, cast adrift and descending into madness. They've lost the life-sustaining secret to the magical ruby-red glass that was once made in the local glassworks, and their predicament cannot be solved by the mystic (Josef Bierbichler, the only actor not hypnotized) who appears with premonitions of the fate of all humankind. All of this is mere pretense for Herzog's loftier (and not altogether successful) ambition: to present haunting, mysterious images that seem directly drawn from our collective subconscious. In his visionary defiance of conventional narrative, Herzog crafted a timeless, mesmerizing allegory, and one of the most eerily beautiful films ever made. --Jeff Shannon

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Attitude, my friends, March 27, 2002

By 

El Gordo (Minneapolis, MN USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Heart of Glass (DVD)

I bought this DVD because I was intrigued by the description of a small village gripped by insanity following the death of a glassmaker. But when I watched it I immediately dubbed it horrible. I felt as though it had killed me.

After that night, though, I couldn't get the pictures out of my head. I could vividly recall scenes from the film, and as they played out in my mind they seemed so beautiful. The more I thought, the more I realized that I had merely watched the movie with the wrong idea, expecting something that it was not. The attitude of the movie became clear to me. When I watched it the second time I was stunned by how amazingly well the stupor and dazed madness of the town was portrayed. The events and actions of the characters engulfed me and drew me into the story. The hypnotic trance of the actors provides an effect I have never seen before. This truly is a great film if you are prepared for it.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An alienation that you can't escape, April 1, 2005

By 

alex bushman (Michigan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Heart of Glass (DVD)

It's not a veiled secret that the actors in this movie were hypnotized before the camera started rolling. If you didn't know that already then you'd catch it in the commentary. Similarly, the viewer feels hypnotized as well. There is a sense of impending doom that clouds over this film and the audience can feel it. Yet, like the actors the audience can't bear to look away from what is transpiring on the screen. Somehow, Herzog is a master at including beautiful landscape shots in his films and this film is no exception starting out with a great sequence full of nature shots. What comes after that is much more interesting and natural, to me anyway. Herzog also has a way of capturing a fiction that feels documentary to the way the undercurrent of life can sometimes go. His ablility to expose this is one thing that makes him great. This film may seem less essential to the person who loves his commonly held classics like "Aguirre: the wrath of God" "Fitzcarraldo" and "Woyzek," but it still carries the Herzog standard of quality and I find it more interesting than the other films simply because I feel it skims across a more interesting terrain that otherwise wouldn't be exposed.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant and Uncanny, March 18, 2003

By 

Marcus Nicholas Niko (Chicago, IL United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Heart of Glass [VHS] (VHS Tape)

There is only one word to describe this movie: Uncanny. The director has hypnotized the actors. They meander through the movie,lost and not quite at home, their blank stares leaving imprints on the consciousness of the viewer. Not a gimmick. Much too complex to be a gimmick. The intense visual imagery, characteristic of all herzog movies, is in this movie the most haunting and unnerving. It may not be as sound in plot, or as epic as Fitzcarraldo or Kaspar Hauser, but for people who don't need something substantial to happen every 5 seconds in a film (and so those who don't suffer from television or hollywood induced Attention Deficit Disorder)Heart of Glass no doubt will be a force of visual fury, done subtly but surely, evoking the uncanny upon each viewing.