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A supernal visualization of a prophet's apocalypse ("Before the day is over, the end will come") at the edge of the world (Bavaria, 1800s). The lost art of "ruby glass," gone with the death of the foreman, leaving the townspeople bereft. The industrialist's son (Stefan Güttler) is a drowsy, dandified vampire suffering from Rimbaud's vertigos, "the chaos of the stars makes my head ache." He locates the elusive dye in the blood of his servant, and ponders the age's dilemma: "What are factories still good for?" Meanwhile, the divination of the cowherd (Josef Bierbichler) proceeds beyond rural crisis and toward the next century's Reich and, finally, into timeless fable. Werner Herzog has at his disposal the somnambulist timbre of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Friedrich skies, like a silent-film director he invents a look. Candelabra, harp, torch and goose are among his compositional elements, interiors combine hot candle yellows with inky blacks in startling chiaroscuro. (Glimpsed through a door ajar, the outside world shivers in bright turquoise.) The joke is that this misty beauty is home to Woody Allen's Village Idiots' Convention, where drinking buddies solemnly smash beer mugs over each other's heads and the wizened patriarch rises from his chair for the first time in twelve years just so he can misplace his shoes. Herzog's absurdist take on Mackendrick's Whisky Galore!, as weighty as the eyelids of the hypnotized actors and spacious enough for a mini-documentary on glass-blowing—the camera raptly observes as the molten mass from a furnace is spun into a translucent horsey. "Out of the falling and the flying, a new land emerges." The final vision quotes The Birds for the madness and hope of humankind's last stand. Cinematography by Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein.
--- Fernando F. Croce |