Artists who make their mark on the world are the ones who dare to experiment, who take big chances in the belief that they can show us something new.

Werner Herzog’s “Heart of Glass” was such an experiment, a hypnotic Bavarian period piece about prophecy, class, tradition, lost knowledge and the fragility of existence. Herzog, at the peak of his art cinema early career, took a shot at having most of his cast hypnotized for their scenes, which gives the film a disorienting, mesmerizing quality thanks to the achingly slow, sometimes random, off-center nature of the performances.

It doesn’t really work. At its worst, it’s like a period parody of the art cinema of the day, “Pythonesque” without the laughs. Herzog prefigures David Lynch’s filmed invitations to enter his dreams. But whatever message this brooding sleepwalk is sending, it’s simply unsatisfying as a narrative. “Glass” is indulgent in ways that make one wonder about the artist’s own state of consciousness at the time.

A stoner period piece nightmare? Something like that. As striking as some scenes and images are, how was this ever supposed to “work” as cinema?

A lonely prophet (Joseph Bierbichler) speaks his truths to whoever will listen in the late 18th century village he has settled in.

Hias is a doomsayer. “I look into the distance to the end of the world,” he narrates (in German, subtitled). “Before the day is over, the end will come.”

He makes his pronouncements to any who ask, or any who will listen. “They come to pass,” he insists, no matter what the listener believes.

This Alpine town is full of believers. A crisis is upon them. Their only industry is imperiled. The foreman at the glassworks has died, and with him, the secret to making the town’s famous “ruby red glass.”

Some become manic at Hias’ pronouncements about their gloomy fate. Others are resigned to drinking their fears away. But the baron who owns the glassworks (Stefan Güttler) is obsessed with finding the formula. He puts glassblowers to work experimenting, badgers the dead man’s widow and even sends off for her sofa when he becomes convinced that foreman scribbled the recipe down and hid it inside the cushions.

Hias, who takes the time to dispell local fears that “giants” will awaken and reconquer the Earth, wades through this madness, observes some of it from afar and continues to prophesy doom. As if that’ll help.

Herzog opens the film in fog and hits us with striking images of the waterfalls and gorges of the Swiss borderlands with Bavaria. He stages forlorn arguments over beer — with a stein slowly broken over a drinking partner’s head. The baron’s high-handed obsession turns murderous.

And still the glassblowers blow and work their glass as if the end isn’t nigh. These scenes are the film’s most visually arresting, a veritable ballroom dance of blowers and globs of molten glass weaving amongst each other as they approach the furnace and ply their trade.

It’s a real relief to know that these real-life artisans — like Bierbichler, playing the prophet — were not hypnotized while making the movie. Other scenes involving drunks, corpses and a dog goaded into waking the “dead” with a pitchfork, were.

The dazed, surreal and slow-walking performances of the hypnotized reminded me of Hitchcock’s “Rope,” an experiment in storytelling with long takes without edits. The Master of Suspense realized, only afterwards, that editing is the essence of cinema, the way suspense is created and heightened. He never did it again.

Herzog almost certainly learned to never try hypnotizing his actors again. Klaus Kinski, for one, would have disemboweled him for trying. Whatever he learned from this experiment he internalized in his own persona.

The bold adventurer who made “Aguirre” and “Fitzcarraldo” became a mesmerizing screen presence, voice-over narrator and interview subject. He was and remains a fascinating character, a philospher of film and the human condition. If he needed to try something “out there” to get where he was going, “Heart of Glass” was worth the gamble. Without that gimmick, it’s questionable whether this folk parable oddity would merit mention in the long course of his career.

Rating: TV-MA, violence

Cast: Josef Bierbichler, Stefan Güttler, Clemens Scheitz, Volker Prechtel, Wilhelm Friedrich and Sonja Skiba.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Werner Herzog, based on a story by  Herbert Achternbusch. A New Yorker Films (US) release on Tubi, Mubi, other streamers.

Running time: 1:35