Heart of Glass is a combination medieval fever-dream and euro-Deadhead lsd trip, an opaque but apparently finely crafted artifact encountered somewhere along a blind journey from Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev to Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man. Herzog succeeds, like Tarkovsky, in evoking the otherness of the pre-industrial past and substituting allegorical rumblings for story. The video box blurb claims Herzog hypnotized his actors, and their blank anxiousness seems to substantiate this. The sparse narrative involves a pre-modern glassworks where the master glassblower has just died, taking the secret of his superlative "ruby glass" with him, to the great distress of the factory's workers and owner, while the dark prophecies of the resident brooding mystic bring everyone further down. The film's a good vehicle for transporting the viewer out of fast-paced ad-cluttered nowness, and watching the glass-blowers do their thing is visually diverting while it lasts--but don't expect to see a movie, exactly.