Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Heart of Glass
1976 · Werner Herzog · Heart of Glass on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch how the villagers move like they're half asleep. (performance)
Herzog filmed almost the entire cast under hypnosis, so their gestures land a beat off, never quite cheating toward the camera or landing precisely on a mark.
Payoff: These aren't actors performing distress; their bodies are somewhere else entirely, and you can feel it. In the reading: spiritual-automaton. The reading calls this the spiritual automaton, an image that reaches the viewer directly by bypassing conscious will.
Watch color drain from everything except the ruby glass. (light)
The village scenes hold to gray, brown, and mist, while the molten and finished ruby glass burns arterial red, nearly the only saturated color in the film.
Payoff: One object carries almost all the film's warmth, so you keep watching for it to appear.
Watch figures shrink small against empty sky and fog. (camera)
Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein frames people dwarfed by landscape, a composition Herzog has traced to Caspar David Friedrich's paintings of solitary figures before an abyss.
Payoff: The land keeps looking bigger than anyone's grief, which makes the grief feel bottomless.
Listen for the drone under the village's near silence. (sound)
Popol Vuh's score favors sustained tones over melody, and dialogue is delivered flat, so sound never tells you how to feel about a scene.
Payoff: The film keeps its distance from your emotions, and that distance is what makes it unsettling.
Watch the peasant seer stand apart from the villagers. (staging)
Josef Bierbichler, the film's one unhypnotized actor, is staged and framed as separate from the trance-state crowd around him, always watching rather than joining.
Payoff: He's the only person in the film who seems fully conscious, and yet he can change nothing. In the reading: the seer (voyant). The reading calls him the seer, a watcher who endures and testifies but cannot act on what he sees.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the ruby glass. It's the only warm color left once the man who knew its secret is gone.