Heart of Glass · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the one warm thing in the whole film: the ruby glass, glowing arterial red in a world otherwise drained to grey, brown, and mist. A foreman dies and takes the formula with him. After that the village has a hole in the middle of it where a piece of knowledge used to be, and everyone keeps circling the hole. Heart of Glass is the rare film you can describe as an event that happened to its actors rather than a story they performed — Herzog put almost the entire cast under clinical hypnosis and shot them in trance. That single decision is the key to everything Deleuze can help us see here.

Begin with the obvious place the concepts land. Deleuze has a name for the deepest ambition of cinema: the spiritual automaton — the image that bypasses the will and touches thought directly, sometimes by forcing it, sometimes (in Artaud's darker version) by registering thought's own powerlessness, its 'impower.' Usually this is a metaphor for what film does to a viewer. Herzog made it literal. The hypnotised villagers, the owner Huttenbesitzer sliding toward murder, all of them move as automatons whose interior has been switched off and left running. Watch how they occupy a room: they don't cheat toward the lens, don't shape a line for an audience, don't quite land on their marks. The body is present; the person is somewhere behind it. What Wiene only depicted in Cesare the somnambulist in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari — a body in directed trance — Herzog transferred from character to method. The trance is no longer a plot device. It is how the film was made.

This is why the old action-grammar dissolves. In a movement-image, a character perceives a situation and acts to change it; the loss of a secret would set off a search that resolves. Here nothing of the kind happens. Causality is technically intact — death, lost formula, breakdown, murder — but it has gone slack, subordinated to atmosphere and repetition. The characters can no longer react adequately to what they perceive. They can only look. Deleuze calls these pure optical and sound situations (opsigns and sonsigns): moments where seeing replaces doing because doing has become impossible. The whole village is reduced to staring at an absence.

And one man does nothing but see. Hias, the peasant prophet — played by the single un-hypnotised actor, Josef Bierbichler — is Deleuze's seer (voyant) in pure form: not an agent but a watcher and endurer, planted outside the glassworks, prophesying the world's end. The film's strangest paradox is that Bierbichler, fully conscious, looks more entranced than the hypnotised cast around him. That is Herzog's point made flesh. The seer doesn't act on his vision; he can't prevent anything. He legends it instead — Deleuze's fabulation, the subject caught in the act of telling a story that calls a missing world into being. Hias's burning landscapes and collapsing orders aren't memories or warnings he can use. They are testimony spoken over an emptied earth.

The spaces match. When Herzog cuts from the suffocating timber interiors to the fog-shrouded Irish cliffs and the sea filling the bottom of the frame, we leave the village's historical time and enter prophetic time. These are Deleuze's any-space-whatevers — deserted, void fields that have stopped being a setting for action and become pure affect. The fog erases scale; figures shrink to specks before the abyss, exactly the Caspar David Friedrich grammar that Murnau had already carried into cinema in Faust and Nosferatu, and that Schmidt-Reitwein inherits shot for shot. In these landscapes the human grows still while the world keeps moving — Deleuze's movement of the world, where motion drains out of the figure and into everything around it.

There's a deeper figure of time at work too. The glassworks is an ordered world — a craft, a lineage, a secret passed hand to hand — and the film shows it rotting from inside the moment the chain breaks. That is crystal-decomposition: an aristocratic, sealed order quietly putrefying once its organising principle is gone. The ruby glass is the crystal; the lost formula is the crack; the obsession and murder are the rot finishing its work. Against it, only the glassblowers — real craftsmen, filmed doing genuinely dangerous labour — hold any solid ground, and Herzog uses their skill precisely to throw the surrounding somnambulism into relief.

What did this do to film as an art? It pushed the New German Cinema's realism past psychology entirely and asked whether a performance could be found rather than built — a question that runs straight back through Bresson's drilled non-actors in Au Hasard Balthazar and Dreyer withholding the script from Falconetti, both of them trying to get under conscious technique. Herzog simply went further than anyone dared, switching the actors off. The risk is real: hypnosis as a stunt. The achievement is that it isn't one. It produces a register no acting school can manufacture — people who are present but not there — and binds it to landscape, drone, and oracular flatness until the film stops resembling drama and becomes incantation.

Watch it again for the bodies. Notice that no one is performing to you, and that this is exactly what makes them impossible to look away from. The film thinks by refusing to let its people think — and hands you, fully awake, the unease of watching a world sleepwalk toward its own end.