Werner Herzog
1976
94 minutes
This is a Herzog-being-weird film. The plot deals with a glassblowing town in Bavaria in the 18th century dealing with the death of the master glassblower in the town, who alone held the secret to making a sort of glass with mystical properties. A seer is predicting the destruction of the glass-blowing factory, and the town descends into madness.
As with a lot of Herzog, the plot is secondary to the weird circumstances of the filming and the actors involved. In this particular film, most of the largely-untrained actors filmed their parts while under hypnosis. This leads to some bizarre and unsettling performances, to say the least.
You wonder how you would do under hypnosis. You used to scoff at it as a mere parlor trick and you're pretty sure the vulgar Manchurian Candidate part of it is complete bullshit or at the very least extremely exaggerated. But you know there's something to be said for altered states of consciousness, chemically induced or otherwise. And it seems logical that meditation could induce such an effect. But the details escape you.
You wonder what it's like inside other people's heads and how it differs from your own. Taking any kind of substance that slows you down mentally is fairly unnerving for you. You definitely notice a difference in your perception of time when under the influence of anything stronger than alcohol. In its natural state, your brain has a feeling that you imagine others might describe as COKEBRAIN. Your thoughts race, your brain reacts quickly to new stimuli, and your "quiet" moments are spent thinking ahead to what might come next. It's a bit exhausting but often very advantageous. It feels like everything in the world is a lock and you have a keyring with thousands of keys on it that you are constantly jamming into every lock you see just in case any of them fit. You ruthlessly discard the ones that don't, but they still cross your mind for a split second. Much of this is verbal. You're looking for the right word, the logical conclusion, how you would describe your current thoughts in a phrase or sentence. And when you're bored or thinking of "nothing" your mind becomes a gibberish channel where absurdities happen. Most of these absurdities are ruthlessly discarded, but some become insights. And the whole while there's a channel of your brain that is looking for new threats, the next dangerous thing, and how to prepare yourself for it when it happens. You're pretty sure this has saved you from harm on several occasions, and it's a "feature" you're afraid to turn off most of the time.
When you close your eyes to dream, your head is flooded with words and random phrases which usually degenerate into nonsense until something sparks and creates an interesting path to follow. It's like word atoms colliding in your brain and occasionally sticking together to accumulate and become molecules and forming almost-nonsense sentences. FLEA. CHAIR. FLEA-CHAIR. FIRE. FLEA-CHAIR-FIRE. HOW DO I EXTINGUISH THE FLEA CHAIR FIRE. And suddenly you have the makings of a poem or a nightmare.
When you're wide awake you can harness this energy pretty easily, but the chaos is there. And obviously if you're dreaming or falling asleep, dreams are dreams. But when you're in an altered state of consciousness, the chaos subsides and your staticky radio is tuned to only one or two channels. For better or worse, you can focus like a laser on one or two things that seem to matter in the moment and ignore the rest. You imagine this is more like how other people's brains work most of the time (though with a somewhat less-intense laser, if you're feeling arrogant and honest).
It feels unsafe.
Time to pick another film. Don't wear yourself out thinking too hard about it.
Time to choose something different: