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Heart of Glass
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Heart of Glass

1976
Drama
1h 34m
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Avg Percentile 57.73% from 425 total ratings

Ratings & Reviews

(425)
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Rated 06 Mar 2007
92
94th
Not for everyone, but the imagery and dream like feeling blew me away. There are scenes in this film that are among Herzog's very best, and as a whole it's an enigmatic and surreal experiance. The exploration of the chaos of civilization is interesting, and Herzog's illustration of madness with many eccentricities is fascinating. The pacing (especially the slow dialogue) get's a little tiresome, but if you can look past this it's fantastic.
Rated 11 Jul 2009
5
80th
Unimaginably experimental / unique / surreal; a gem from a plane of existence never seen before or since. The attention paid to the music & visuals is particularly involving.
Rated 19 Aug 2013
72
81st
AGUIRRE refers to an animal that is never fully awake; here men sleepwalk to their doom, the only exceptions to this somnambulistic state being, it seems, seers (possibly) and craftsmen at work. As with hypnosis, one must be receptive to it for the film to work, but for those willing to go along with it, it is strangely mesmerising, if not transfixing. Some remarkable imagery and music. My fiftieth Herzog.
Rated 06 Feb 2007
70
52nd
One of the more difficult Herzog films. It has some of the most lovely and spellbinding sights in any of his movies, yet it has some of the most frustrating bits as well. The largely hypnotized cast is the weirdest element, and it makes a few of the performances very interesting, but makes others downright annoying. I think it's worth watching once in a while, though.
Rated 07 Feb 2007
70
35th
As always with Herzog, there were lots of great moments, memorable images. But it gets dragged down by gimmicks... not just the central gimmick of having all the actors perform under hypnosis (though that's plenty bad enough) but also the imaginary bear, the guy who won't stand up, the apparently retarded girl with the shaved head, and Herzog's damned insistence on once again casting that annoying midget Scheitz. Nonetheless, if you can look past all that, it is a very interesting movie.
Rated 29 Jul 2007
83
93rd
If you can appreciate genuine weirdness, this is for you. Well, first of all it's visually stunning - Herzog used footage of landscape shot all over the world for this, but the interiors are beautifully shot as well. Then there are the hypnotized actors - an ingenious touch, not at all a gimmick since the script is just outlandish enough to totally warrant it. Again Herzog succeeds in making something transcendental, new, simply one-of-a-kind.
Rated 21 Sep 2007
70
59th
My least favorite Herzog thus far. Great cinematography, and great acting, but it felt rather dull.
Rated 06 May 2008
58
46th
I thought the premise seemed fascinating and relevant before I saw this film, and I was eager to see what a hypnotized cast would act like. Unfortunately, the end result just wasn't illuminating or particularly interesting.
Rated 29 Apr 2009
3
74th
I wish the whole movie could be like the beginning and the end of it.
Rated 28 Sep 2009
3
45th
One of Herzog's more experimental achievements. Supposedly using hypnosis, he evokes very odd performances from all the actors, but it works. The film is marked by a collective stagnation on behalf of its characters, who work towards a goal even they can't define. A truly surreal experience.
Rated 07 Jul 2015
75
65th
Whatever I say will sound pretentious so: HOLY SCHEITZ
Rated 17 Dec 2017
78
89th
Herzog creates a hermetically sealed world that becomes increasingly opaque and dark as it progresses towards its highly ambiguous conclusion that doesn't initially seem connected to previous events. It appears to be an allegory/elegy for the destruction of artisan/folk cultures with the emergence of the industrial revolution, but it's hard to say. It's his most formally radical work though, and its rich earth tones and murky interiors resemble luminous oil paintings.
Rated 16 Aug 2018
70
72nd
Strangest and most experimental film in Herzog's career -- working under hypnosis, actors did all sorts of crazy dialogues and stuff, like spinning, dancing with a dead body etc. A film about trance with people in trance. Sometimes way too WTF, but always engrossingly exquisite -- this might have the best photography of any Herzog fiction feature. Last shots on the Skellig Islands are pure delight.
Rated 26 May 2010
20
2nd
10 for the approach and 10 for cinematography. What's the point? Even with the audio commentary I didn't get it. A promising plot which is undermined by the acting(? - hey, those people were hypnotized! You can't call that acting...)
Rated 01 Jun 2010
75
45th
Maybe you have to be hypnotized as well to actually get this.
Rated 08 Jun 2010
71
40th
I... don't really know what to make of this. On the one hand, it has some breathtaking shots (it is a Herzog film. What else is new?). On the other hand, it's pretty damn incomprehensible. The fact that the actors were all under hypnosis is indeed quite fascinating, but I don't really see how it contributed to the quality of the movie. It seems like if Herzog wanted them to act all sleepy, they could have just acted all sleepy. Definitely need to watch this again.
Rated 06 Nov 2010
84
93rd
Not without its flaws but still totally unique; in turns beautifully enchanting and darkly, absurdly hilarious. One of those films that creates its own little world which I'm tempted to revisit often.
Rated 10 Dec 2010
77
86th
Very strange and beautiful.
Rated 17 Jan 2011
76
57th
76.125
Rated 12 Jan 2012
84
68th
It's a steep climb, for sure, but the view is worth it.
Rated 23 May 2012
65
42nd
too bad I wasn't hypnotized as well
Rated 05 Oct 2013
79
61st
78.500
Rated 30 Oct 2013
80
68th
I don't know what the hell was going on but I liked it.
Rated 30 Oct 2013
73
46th
A weird film, not so much in its content (although it is as strange as Herzog gets) but in my reaction to it -- I feel that this film is simultaneously rather unremarkable and impressionless and pretty boring, and yet grand and epic and faces the world in a larger than life manner that Herzog usually goes for. In the end, the good outweight the bad.
Rated 23 Jul 2014
5
70th
wondrous photography as usual, some of it rather unusual this time. but it's not up there with herzog's best. normally he has deathly focus on the psyche of an individual person, but this is a bit less focused, so though we never understand, here we don't really even *feel*. but it's still somewhat captivating. popul vuh great as always.
Rated 12 Aug 2014
75
30th
Some imagery works fine without literal interpretation. Heart of Glass seems to me to be such a work. We may not quite know what it makes us think, we know how it makes us feel.
Rated 12 Mar 2016
90
92nd
Like Nosferatu, Heart of Glass is a more self-contained Herzog film in that it's explicitly stylised. It's an exploration into what's left of a society when the secret of its glassblowing industry is lost. This is just the scaffolding, and what Herzog is really concerned with is how such events can expose the underlying frailties of the human condition. The cast were hypnotised for most scenes, and you sometimes get the sense that they're vessels for Herzog to convey strands of his own musings.
Rated 13 Oct 2016
66
51st
An intersting experiment
Rated 20 Jun 2020
75
76th
I didn't find this nearly as weird as I was expecting. The pacing is definitely a little slow, for obvious reasons, but not off-puttingly so. It seemed like a pretty straightforward folktale allegory, buttressed by the central character's prophecies, which are in the usual Herzog mode ("the edge of the world is crumbling" - stuff like that). The cinematography was gorgeous. Thoroughly enjoyed it.
Rated 14 Jun 2021
75
95th
a Visual Poetic SurReal Film!!!
Rated 14 Nov 2021
92
91st
Coração de Cristal estreava há 45 anos no Festival de Paris. Esse filme é bonito demais, me lembra certa tradição do cinema português pós Revolução dos Cravos, entre o poético e o mítico, que Monteiro e Oliveira tão bem abraçaram e que Herzog aqui eleva à décima potência. Box Versátil Novo Cinema Alemão.
Rated 20 Mar 2022
90
90th
Deliciously bizarre, a village robotripping through the uncanny valley. Very romantic depictions of the landscape, and like much of Herzog's work it invokes the mythic ascensions of old German Mountain Films. Here he attempts to transmit hypnosis through the screen, and if the viewer is open to suggestion it's an effective trick.
Rated 30 Mar 2022
50
25th
Very scenic, quiet movie, everybody just is boring and overacting, expect Hias, he looks like a depress alcoholic version of Sam from LOTR and the whole predicting the future is interesting. The handheld camera moments are awful and are almost compensated by the beautiful panoramic shots, but the story is so lacking, so pseudo-symbolistic that I literally felt asleep and woke up at 4:30am very confused, and had to finish it today
Rated 07 Jun 2023
44
25th
Honestly, I just couldn't get into this. The main story wasn't interesting and neither were any of the characters.

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