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THURSDAY
Werner Herzog has never felt the need to undertake a mission to Mars to find alien terrain; the New German Cinema’s most mystical director locates the exotic and the inexplicable in the history, mythology, anthropology, and even geology of the world around him. Sometimes, though, even Herzog finds extreme measures necessary. For Heart of Glass, his 1976 film about a village’s desperate quest to rediscover the formula for the type of glass that made its fortune, the director hypnotized the cast. The narrative is oblique at best, but that wasn’t Herzog’s concern. He wanted to create “an atmosphere of hallucination, of prophecy, of the visionary, and of collective madness,” as he once said, and the film certainly achieves it. Heart of Glass screens at 6:30 p.m. at the Goethe-Institut, 814 7th St. NW. Free. For reservations call (202) 289-1200. (Mark Jenkins)