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| G. W. Pabst: Die Büchse der Pandora / Pandora's Box (DE 1929). On Christmas Eve in a London slum in a desolate garret under a broken window Lulu (Louise Brooks) lights a candle and picks up the mistletoe. They have been bestowed on Jack the Ripper by a compassionate maid of the Salvation Army whose brass band plays Christmas carols during the finale. Photo from IMDb. Please click on the image to expand it. |
Die Büchse der Pandora. Variationen auf das Thema Frank Wedekinds "Lulu" / Pandoran lipas / Pandoras ask.
DE 1929. Nero-Film AG (Berliini). Copyright: Praesens-Film AG. P: Seymour Nebenzahl.
D: G. W. Pabst. Ass D: Mark Sorkin, Paul Falkenberg. SC: Ladislaus Vajda – based on the tragedies Erdgeist (Maahinen, 1895) and Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandoran lipas, 1902) by Frank Wedekind . DP: Günther Krampf – panchromatic emulsion – 1:1,33 – b&w – silent – 8 Akte – 3255 m /20 fps, 19 fps/. AD: Andrej Andrejew, Bohumil Heš. Photos: Hans Casparius.
C: Louise Brooks (Lulu), Fritz Kortner (Dr. Ludwig Schön), Franz Lederer (Alwa Schön), Carl Goetz (Schigolch), Krafft-Raschig (Rodrigo Quast), Alice Roberts (Countess Geschwitz), Daisy d’Ora (Dr. Schön's fiancée), Gustav Diessl (Jack the Ripper), Michael von Newlinski (Marquis Casti-Piani), Siegfried Arno (stage manager).
German intertitles
1929: 3255 m /20 fps/ 141 min, /19 fps/ 149 min
1998 (Bologna, La Cinémathèque française): 3018 m /20 fps/ 132 min
2009: 3068 m /20 fps/ 133 min, /19 fps/ 141 min
Uraufführung 9.2.1929 Gloria-Palast, Berlin – banned in Finland 20.3.1929 – first screened at the Finnish Film Archive 13.3.1962 – first Finnish telecast Yle TV2 17.7.1984.
Reconstruction and restoration:
Analogue reconstruction-in-progress Filmmuseum – Münchner Stadtmuseum (Munich 1997).
Digital restoration Deutsche Kinemathek (Berlin 2009). 3068 m
This 2K restoration was created from three duplicate elements from the collections of the Cinémathèque française, Gosfilmofond and Národni filmový archiv. Funded by Hugh M. Hefner, this restoration was a collaboration between the George Eastman Museum, La Cinémathèque française, Národni filmový archiv, Gosfilmofond and the Deutsche Kinemathek - Museum für Film und Fernsehen. Restoration supervisor: Martin Koerber. Restoration: Haghefilm Conservation BV, Amsterdam.
Blu-rays viewed and Alban Berg's opera Lulu listened to at home in preparation to my lecture "Weimar Cinema / Pandora's Box" at Aalto University, Department of Film, Marsio, Otakaari 2, 30 Oct 2024
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| G. W. Pabst: Die Büchse der Pandora / Pandora's Box (DE 1929). The 2024 edition of The Criterion Collection. Lulu (Louise Brooks) in funeral dress after the death of Ludwig Schön on their wedding night. Cover art: Eric Skillman. Photo: Hans Casparius. |
Blu-ray special edition features:
New 2K digital restoration
Four musical scores, by Gillian Anderson, Dimitar Pentchev, Peer Raben, and Stéphan Oliva
Audio commentary (2005) by film scholars Thomas Elsaesser and Mary Ann Doane
Louise Brooks: Looking for Lulu (1998), a documentary by Hugh Munro Neely
Lulu in Berlin (1971), a rare interview with actor Louise Brooks, by Richard Leacock and Susan Steinberg Woll
Interviews with Leacock and Michael Pabst (2006), director G. W. Pabst’s son
PLUS: An essay by critic J. Hoberman (2006), notes on the scores, Kenneth Tynan’s 1979 “The Girl in the Black Helmet,” and an article by Brooks on her relationship with Pabst (1965).
Optional English subtitles
Region: A
3068 m /19 fps/ 141 min
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| G. W. Pabst: Die Büchse der Pandora / Pandora's Box (DE 1929). The 2024 edition of Eureka! The Masters of Cinema Series. Cover art: Tony Stella. |
SPECIAL FEATURES
Limited Edition Box Set - 3000 Copies
Limited Edition Hardcase featuring artwork by Tony Stella
Limited Edition 60-Page Book featuring new writing on the film by critics Alexandra Heller Nicholas, Imogen Sara Smith, and Richard Combs; alongside archival stills and imagery
1080p HD presentation on Blu-ray from a definitive 2K digital restoration
Orchestral Score by Peer Raben
New audio commentary by critic Pamela Hutchinson
New visual appreciation by author and critic Kat Ellinger
New video essay by David Cairns
New video essay by Fiona Watson
Optional English subtitles
Region: B
3068 m /20 fps/ 133 min
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| Alban Berg: Lulu (posthumous 1935 / premiered in two acts 1937 / complete in three acts 1979). Orchestration of the third act completed by Friedrich Cerha. The first recording of the complete opera: Deutsche Grammophon 1979 - Teresa Stratas (Lulu) / Franz Mazura (Dr. Schön) / Kenneth Riegel (Alwa Schön) / Yvonne Minton (Countess Geschwitz) - conductor: Pierre Boulez - Opéra de Paris. 3-CD Box Set with a booklet of 222 pages, libretto in German and English, 2000. |
AA: It was a thrill to see the 2009 restoration of Pandora's Box for the first time. That restoration has been around all these years, but because I saw in Pordenone in 2007 the previous restoration at the closing gala, and the following year we screened that version in Helsinki ourselves, I felt no urgency to revisit the movie sooner.
I have been mesmerized by Pandora's Box since I saw it for the first time in 1981 at the Filmklubben / Filmstaden / Svenska Filminstitutet in Stockholm. The duration was 150 min, probably because it was presumably screened at 16 fps, and if that was the case, the length of the version must have been around 2770 m.
In all versions the distinction is the timeless presence of Louise Brooks as Lulu. G. W. Pabst had never met her before the filming started, but he knew she was right by her presence in A Girl in Every Port. Still today Louise Brooks is original and unique, a model for countless homages, imitations and influences, but only the exterior can be imitated.
Henri Langlois said that like sculptures of classical Antiquity still project the grandeur of the spirit of the age, Pandora's Box is capable of doing so in the coming millennia.
A key to this is how Louise Brooks transcends conventional sex and gender roles and received notions of identity. Words like "sexual ambivalence" and "bisexuality" have been evoked, but now I feel that she goes beyond even them, to an earlier, more original dimension of identity. Brooks said that she never acted sexy and never thought being sexy, not even while having sex. She was not self-conscious about sex. She was simply being herself.
Lotte H. Eisner, who had met Louise Brooks in Berlin when she was filming with Pabst (and reading Schopenhauer during a break), was the first to give full credit to her presence. That happened in Chapter XVIII "Pabst et le miracle de Louise Brooks" in L'Écran démoniaque (1952) which was translated into English as The Haunted Screen.
Soon after at the "60 Years of Cinema" exhibition at the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris in 1955 there were "two gigantic portraits looming down from wires in positions of co-equal honor" (Barry Paris): Falconetti in The Passion of Jeanne d'Arc and Brooks in Pandora's Box. Since then, Pandora's Box has become a banner film of the 1920s - although it failed during its original run and was censored and cut - even banned in countries like Finland. But since the 1950s its status has kept growing, and it has even become a symbol for cinema itself.
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| Peter Graham (1939-2020): A Dictionary of the Cinema. A. Zwemmer Limited (London) / A. S. Barnes & Co. (New York), Tantivy Press, 1964. Probably my first film book. Photo: Lulu (Louise Brooks) examines the biceps of Rodrigo Quast (Krafft-Raschig) in G. W. Pabst: Die Büchse der Pandora / Pandora's Box (DE 1929). Photo: Hans Casparius. |
Watching the restoration on the Criterion and Eureka blu-rays the Pandora experience turns even more profound than before. Because I hadn't seen the movie in 16 years I cannot reliably compare, but the film feels like new although there is probably nothing new storywise.
Martin Koerber, who was in charge of the restoration, has stressed how particular G. W. Pabst was with the editing. Pabst conducted the editing himself, although on some prints and copies others get credit. For Pabst, every frame counted, and the distinction in this restoration is that now every frame counts again. This was only possible to achieve by digital means. There are no original sources, and the restoration had to happen from duped and battered materials. The smoothness of the transitions and the consistent quality in the definition of light are impressive.
I love to disagree with Siegfried Kracauer on almost every page of From Caligari to Hitler. He fails utterly to comprehend Pandora's Box for starters, yet his discourse is unmissable on Pabst. Here he assesses Pabst's aesthetics of invisible cutting (in contrast to the confrontational and discontinuous montage of the Soviet school): "Pabst departs from them technically, because he ventures into the indefinite world of facts. His insistence upon cutting results from his keen concern with given reality. He utilizes tiny pictorial particles to capture the slightest impressions, and he fuses these particles into a finespun texture to mirror reality as a continuity".
Pabst has been with reason linked with New Objectivity, and his undeniable influences from Expressionism have been registered. But inspired by Kracauer's observation of Pabst utilizing "tiny pictorial particles to capture the slightest impressions" I also feel that Pabst has been influenced by Impressionism. Pabst is fascinated by the fleeting moment, and he takes trouble in covering minutiae. This restoration helps us appreciate this dimension better.
This time I registered how different all eight acts of Pandora's Box are. Each has a different imagery: - Lulu's apartment - Schön's apartment - Backstage - the Wedding - the Trial - the Night Train - the Ship of Gamblers - the London Fog. The movie is a showcase of the full range of the visual mastery of late silent cinema, Weimar cinema and G. W. Pabst.
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PANDORA'S SECRET
There is a secret in Pandora's Box. In thrall of Louise Brooks, I did not get it at first sight, and in 1995, when I published the first edition of my MMM Film Guide, I still missed it, but in 2005 in the second edition I registered it.
It is implicit in Frank Wedekind's Lulu plays and Alban Berg's opera Lulu. I don't remember how it appears in Leopold Jessner's Earth Spirit.
In Pabst's film it is made explicit in heartbreaking intertitles. Lulu refers to Schigolch: "Er ist mein erster... Mäzen" ("He is my first... patron") and "Er ist mein Vater" ("He is my father").
Pabst has the tendency of turning the main clause into a subclause. It is part of his general drive to introduce an offbeat, unexpected and even contradictory approach into the fabula. For example whenever he employs a genre or a style, he executes it against the grain.
Pandora's Box is an incest tragedy. However, not told in terms of dramatic emphasis but in the cool detachment of New Objectivity. There are also affinities with the Distancing Effect (Verfremdungseffekt / V-Effekt) of Bertolt Brecht and the Defamiliarization (Ostraneniya) of Russian Formalists such as Viktor Shklovsky.
The most tender sequence of the film is the finale with Jack the Ripper. "It is Christmas Eve, and she is about to receive the gift that has been her dream since childhood: death by a sexual maniac" (Louise Brooks). For Brooks, the only disappointment was that the knife did not hit the vagina.
Louise Brooks was born on 14 November 1906. At age 9, around 1915-1916, she lived in Cherryvale, Kansas. 40 years later Louise's childhood friend Betty sent her a photograph where Louise was together with Mr. Flowers. He was nice to little girls and offered them popcorn. Brooks had forgotten all about it, but now she remembered. One day Louise knocked on his door to ask for more. "I was done in by a middle aged man when I was nine", she wrote to Herman G. Weinberg. She also told Kenneth Tynan that "I was loused up by my Lolita experiences". At the time, Louise also told her mother. She put the blame on Louise for "leading him on".
For Barry Paris in his magnificent 609-page Louise Brooks biography, Mr. Flowers is the "Rosebud" of the star's life.
The insult to the injury is also already implicit in Hesiod's telling of the myth of Pandora's Box from which all the evils were unleashed into the world. There is a parallel to the myth of the Garden of Eden where Eve is the one who eats the forbidden fruit and gives some to the man, and consequently God expels them from Paradise.
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