Pandora’s Box
(Die Büchse der Pandora) (Süd-Film, Germany, 1929)
Dir.: Georg Wilhelm Pabst; scen.: Georg Wilhelm Pabst, Ladislaus Vajda, based on Frank Wedekind’s play “Lulu”; cast: Louise Brooks (Lulu), Fritz Kortner (Dr. Ludwig Schön), Francis Lederer (Alwa Schön), Carl Goetz (Schigolch), Krafft-Raschig (Rodrigo Quast); DCP 4K, 133’ (transferred 20 to 24 fps), black and white; intertitle/subtitle language: DE/EN,PL; source: Deutsche Kinemathek.
In Berlin in 1926, director Georg Wilhelm Pabst began an obsessive two-year search for an actress. In scenes similar to those witnessed a decade later during the casting of Scarlett O’Hara for ”Gone With the Wind”, women were approached in railway stations and on street corners by Pabst’s assistants before being taken to see him. Some possessed the look but couldn’t act, others great skill but the wrong physical attributes. Two thousand were seen, many hundreds tested. All were turned down. Newspapers and magazines followed the story. Looking for a Lulu held a national interest.
Frank Wedekind’s erotic heroine is one of the great figures of modern German literature. In Wedekind’s plays, which had scandalized fin-de-siècle society and seen him briefly jailed, the character Lulu, the embodiment of primitive sexuality and the fantasy of any male who associates with her, creates havoc unawares. Driven by curiosity and free of moral constraint, she can express herself only through pleasure. The anarchy and destruction she wreaks – in blissful ignorance – become the redeemers by which society might purge itself of sexual repression. More a concept than a character, Lulu was a poetical German figure, perhaps even an element of the nation’s psyche. While a foreigner could play her – the Dane Asta Nielsen had starred in two previous filmed versions – some thought only a German could be her, and vice versa. Thankfully Pabst thought otherwise. More concerned with cinema than with literature, and ambivalent about the prevailing Expressionism, he sought to combine Wedekind’s two plays, modifying their Grand Guignol excesses and ditching their chief theatrical tool – their characters’ unrealistic, hysterical speech. Their complexities would have to be rendered in silence. Pabst was developing a new “objective” cinematic style, and wanted this Lulu to be “real”. More real than anything else – for Pabst and for film – was her visual image, and if this vision hailed from another continent, then so be it.
In September 1928, 21-year-old Louise Brooks, from Cherryvale, Kansas, walked away from Hollywood and toward immortality. A dancer first, she’d entered movies by way of Broadway and the Follies at 17. Breathtakingly beautiful and defiantly sexual, she’d come to Pabst’s attention earlier that year in Howard Hawks’s ”A Girl in Every Port”, playing a cold-souled predator. He’d asked for her but was refused – she belonged to Paramount. Now, as the legend goes, at the very moment Brooks was refusing a new contract in B.P. Schulberg’s office, the young Marlene Dietrich was outside Pabst’s door in Berlin, about to be offered the lead in „Pandora’s Box”. Brooks, suddenly free, was given the role. At a time when America was luring many of the best talents from Germany, a Hollywood star was about to travel in the opposite direction. In just 10 months in Europe under Pabst’s guidance, she would redefine the art of screen acting and claim a place in cinema history.
Paul McGann
Neither the negative nor any original print of the film have survived to this day. Three low-quality prints from the 1950s and 1960s, with many image defects, served as source material for the digital restoration. Nevertheless, an attempt was made to restore the original beauty of Pabst’s work using digital image restoration tools. By completing the missing frames and scenes, it has been possible to reconstruct the director’s famous smooth editing.
Sat, Apr 21 | 8pm | Kino Iluzjon