THE SCREEN
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
THE SCREEN It's as if Werner Herzog's films have come into my mind by an immaculate conception—as if I had been touched by them with the tongues of fire. As I admitted in a column on Herzog I...
...In the second the torrent that we see is real enough all right, except that the image itself only exists in Hias's imagination...
...In the face of incidents like this, it is hard to see how proponents of the death penalty can continue to believe that it is effective as a deterrent...
...But, we cannot discharge this responsibility without the knowledge of good and evil, and the traditionalists' claim to this knowledge is being seriously challenged by those who clearly see the evil in the unloving consequences of what the traditionalists call good...
...COLLINS KILBURN Director of Social Ministries North Carolina Council of Churches 159...
...I expect that this kind of desperation and frustration lies at the base of much popular and legislative support of executions...
...Shortly after the publication of her article, Daniel Webster, one of the inmates of North Carolina's death row, took his own life with a razor blade, dramatically illustrating his own suicidal drive [News & Views, Dec...
...This is why Herzog's film allows the interpenetration of the realms of fantasy and reality until, in the end, we can no longer tell which we are in...
...Then he sits on a precipice where he predicts the world will end, at which we see, superimposed translucently on a ground of cloth, water falling with enormous force down a mountain...
...The endless, specious arguments between pro- and anti-abortionists serve, merely to solidify these positions, while obscuring the one approach on which the majority could agree—cooperative efforts to reduce the need for aibortions...
...The trail is like a river of men, and of the paraphernalia of civilization, flowing through the jungle...
...For Hearts of Glass is in general about the greater reality of imaginary experiences and the illusoriness of the world that seems present and "real...
...The historical world Herzog has created here—the obscure local world that exited before the "global" village-was one where men lived intensely among invisible presences and imagined bogies...
...marilyn kramer ______Death on Demand_______ Raleigh, N.C...
...The scales fell away from my eyes so that now Herzog's work appears to me so whole, so original can't leave off talking about it...
...Superimposed on a field of rough cloth, this second waterfall is but a tapestry woven from dreams and visions...
...In the village which is the film's setting, for instance, there is a patriarch (Wilhelm Friedrich), the owner of the glass works which is the village's sole industry, who is senile and only chortles feebly at everything said to him...
...The mist in the first looks like the waterfall in the second...
...It is an image of fire and ice, the encrustations of sulphur disgorged by the hot water looking as if they were something frozen on the edge of the pool...
...The mystery in this film is that of the "ruby" glass which the economy of the village depends upon and whose secret has died with one of the glass-blowers...
...As I admitted in a column on Herzog I wrote last year, the first film of his I ever saw, Fata Morgana, seemed to me incomprehensible...
...In both films the opening imagery also prefigures in some way the story that is to follow...
...Cooperative efforts on hunger and poverty are encouraging, but certainly Christianity is failing to meet this challenge in the abortion issue...
...But in Aguirre and Hearts of Glass the image is less nihilistic, less determined by a modern emptiness...
...By exercising his freedom to choose, man becomes responsible for good and evil and can never be free of this responsibility to live the childlike existence of Eden...
...But for the village's story to end with a dream within a dream would only be right.People have done nothin except wrestle with phantasms the whole film long...
...This island is a type of the insular community in which the film has taken place, and the implication of our encirclement of it is that it is an unknowable past standing in the sea of time...
...Like every Herzog film, this one deals with a mystery around which all the characters dance a circle, trying, but failing, to solve it...
...Whether he is wrestling reality with a non-existent bear, or he himself is in this adventure only a figment of his own imagination as he languishes in prison, it is impossible to say...
...Can Christianity find a broader criterion for morality that will bring goodness closer to the loving that frees others from selfconcern to love in their turn, as Jesus did...
...But when I began again later with a different film, and saw more of them, I found that all at once they made perfect sense...
...In Hearts of Glass the opening is more complex...
...But he becomes involved anyway when he has to come into the village and the factory owner's son asks him to divine what the secret is...
...Hearts of Glass seems to resonate with other Herzog films too...
...The only one who has no interest in all these machinations is Hias...
...First Hias sits in a field looking out on a landscape over which pour (through timelapse photography) great torrents of mist...
...In Aguirre it is we who circle, and at the center lies the historical mystery, Aguirre himself, the last one left standing on his raft, which the camera swoops down on from the river and circumscribes...
...The reason he came was to get help killing a bear, and as he climbs now he is suddenly attacked by some creature invisible to us that springs upon him in the melting snow from a cave...
...Peering out of the bars, Hias longs for the freedom to return to the woods and mountains, and we instantly find him doing just that, climbing the same hillside we saw him descend when he came into the village...
...For us, however, the mystery at the center of each film is somewhat different: it is the characters themselves...
...Because he divines instead that some terrible cataclysm will occur, the townsfolk, thinking Hias at fault for whatever he prophesies, throw him into a dungeon with the owner's son after the latter has burned down the factory...
...I walked out on it...
...A state senator said to me several months ago with regard to capital punishment, "We do not know if it is a deterrent or not, but we have to do something...
...and as such it anticipates the doomed attempt to reach the sea that a detachment led by one of Pizarro's lieutenants, Aguirre (Klaus Kinski), is to make on the Amazon River...
...Fata Morgana is in fact a kind of spiritus mundi in which Herzog created his own body of myths and from which he draws various esoteric images for his other films...
...A number of Herzog's films have ended with an image of someone circling around a mystery which can never be known...
...In Aguirre this image is of a seemingly endless column of soldiers, bearers, missionaries and explorers in Pizarro's party that stretches down a winding mountain trail dense with tropical vegetation...
...Thus, in our outrage at violence, we collaborate with it and encourage it...
...In effect the two images complement each other...
...Or will Christianity remain a haven for those who want the comfort of a commitment to the loving Jesus without the discomfort of a commitment to help and share with their fellowman, a platitude to justify selfinterest, with love distorted into the self-righteous duty to save the world for our own personal salvation, becoming a force for evil rather than good...
...The young man who is to inherit the glass works (Stefan Huttler) becomes so obssessed with the fancy that the secret is blood, he murders a girl in order to provide this ingredient...
...The Herzog film to which Hearts of Glass seems to demand comparison, however, is Aguirre, the Wrath of God...
...Father Greeley should have asked whether Christian theology and liturgy will be able to make Christians aware of the awesome mystery and paradox of this gift and give us the sense of direction, purpose, and humility to discern and follow goodness without creating a crutch, a fantasy, escapism, that allows us to avoid responsibility for good and evil...
...In Hearts of Glass we swoop down from the air and circle around a variety of figures standing on a barren rock island that rises sheer from the sea...
...Although these illusions of water are in a sense drawn like other Herzog images from Fata Morgana, which plays a good deal with the mirages in a desert, the imagery as used here establishes certain ground rules for the imagination to follow in this film alone...
...The habit of separating them is a strictly modern one...
...One way or another almost everybody in the village begins constructing and living in a fantasy world of hypotheses about the glass when their search for its secret proves unavailing...
...In both Dwarfs and Stroszek, this takes the form of a driverless truck circling the empty space, the void, which the truck's own motion descrioes...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...Besides both being set in remote historical time—Aguirre is about Pizarro's 1560 expedition in search of E] Dorado, and Hearts of Glass is set indefinitely in an epoch that seems to run from the Middle Ages up to the nineteenth century—'both films open and close very similarly...
...It is a response to life that sounds like a hollow echo of the boisterous, constant giggling done by one of the characters in Even Dwarfs Started Small, which is another Herzog film about an isolated community that has become a world unto itself...
...The people are demanding it...
...We do not know how many murders are motivated by a desire to destroy themselves, but there have been studies which document increases in homicide rates before and after highly publicized executions...
...149 lost forever the fairy tale land of Eden...
...But in the first what we see, 148 though it exists in reality, is only an illusion of a waterfall...
...In the most recent one to be distributed in this country, Hearts of Glass, at the very heart of the film a cowherd named Hias (Josef Bierbickler) who is gifted with second sight has a vision of a sulphur pool, which is one of the images of elemental nature in Fata Morgana...
...With knife drawn Hias rolls over and over on the ground, wrestling the mythic beast until at last he's killed it...
...The ultimate mystery at the center of the characters' lives in this film is the secret of the ruby glass, just as the mystery at the center of the struggle to survive in Aguirre is El Dorado...
...In the beginning of each is the image—a spectacular image of nature, an image whose beauty will, Herzog hopes, jolt us free from our attachments to the everyday reality of a modern world...
...Because Herzog's films are sui generis, they have to set their own terms right at the outset...
...To the Editors: The article by Sister Lois Spear in the November 25 issue underscores one of the frequently neglected arguments against the death penalty, namely, that it most probably induces some persons to murder...
...Then in the derangement that results, he burns down his own factory...
...Can Christian love become the impetus for a sharing, cooperating world...
Vol. 105 • March 1978 • No. 5
