October 21: Pandora's Box/Die Büchse der Pandora (1929 -- G. W. Pabst

★★★★★

The first time I saw Pandora’s Box years ago, what most impressed me was Brooks’ performance and G.W. Pabst’s direction.  On this viewing, I saw I was right about both.

Louise Brooks is luminous in this film, and her creation of Lulu is the perfect marriage of artist with medium.  Lulu is irrepressibly ebullient, facing problem after problem with a beautiful smile and enthusiastically open arms.  Brooks’ Lulu draws everyone she meets to her, and she trusts everyone because no one can resist her.  She claps her hands and stands on her tiptoes, and she wins the heart of everyone she meets, from the newspaper editor Schon to Alwa and Countess Geschwitz. 

But like her namesake in the movie title, Lulu’s libertine approach to life leads to disaster for most of those who love her.  Schon is killed in a jealous struggle, Alwa sinks into poverty providing for her, and Countess Geschwitz loses her money and becomes involved in gambling/murder scene trying to save Lulu from enslavement to an Egyptian.  Lulu is magnetic – even to the viewer – but she draws her admirers to certain disaster.

I was right about Pabst’s direction, too.  Pandora’s Box moves fast and engages the audience at every point.  The film is divided into eight “acts,” each with its individual, self-contained content and arc.  Act 3, the “theater” scene, is an absolute directorial tour-de-force.  Hordes of exotic, colorful members of a variety revue run into and exit the frame as Lulu, Schon and his fiancé are interacting backstage.  Walking among the scantily-clad girls, the Roman strongmen, and the magicians, the stage manager ushers characters on and off stage, all the while trying to eat a sandwich.  The choreography here amazes, the camera makes small moves, and the scene gets continuity by following the harried stage manager through all this visual richness. 

Pabst’s direction is also particularly visible in the action surrounding a bas-relief in Schon’s bedroom.  Pabst uses the bas-relief, a particularly ugly rectangle portraying a man grasping upwards, in several different ways, each time picking up on some aspect of the artwork to serve his story.  Lit and shot from the side as Lulu and Schon begin their struggle, the bas-relief almost seems a participant with its gesture.  And when the struggle intensifies, Pabst’s camera moves up, the lighting shifts and shows the sculpture grasping as the two antagonists struggle for the gun.  After Schon is shot, the lighting shifts again, and pained face on the figure emphases the tragedy that has just occurred.  But Pabst isn’t finished with the bas-relief at this point; in the next act, Alwa throws his hat towards Lulu, and sculpture appears to be reaching to catch it.  Pabst gets so much out of this bas-relief by placing his actors and moving the lighting and camera.  Pure directorial flair.

In fact, Pandora’s Box is a beautiful film to watch.  Pabst’s frame is always full of visual information.  Starting with the beautiful Deco fireplace that opens the film and going through the pageantry of the variety show, the stylish mourning garb Lulu wears to the trial, the variety of characters that gamble on the Italian boat, and the canted angles of the London apartment, the frame of Pandora’s Box always has something interesting to look at.

German Expressionism was still a vital part of film visuals in 1929, and threatening shadows loom behind characters in Pandora’s Box.  Murky fog fills the streets of London, obscuring people and places while Jack-the-Ripper wanders loose, and shadow-cut smoke fills the gambling den as Alwa tries to win enough money to save Lulu.  Close-ups highlight the exaggerated emotion of silent film, and strong shadows often cut across the actors’ faces or loom behind them.  And the camera moves, too, dropping to distort the characters or rising to dominate them.  Light and camera are notably purposeful here.

The story is a strength, too.  Of course, it creates one of film’s most memorable characters in Lulu, but it adds depth to her by using the father as a major element.  Although Schigolch never approaches Lulu in attractiveness, Lulu has clearly gotten part of her bon vivant attitude from him.  He’s always ready to have a drink and make merry just as she’s irrepressibly positive.  And he’s there for her when she needs him.  The story also uses elements of Weimar life that would soon be removed from film by fascism and the Hays Code.  Pandora’s Box has an assembly of feckless characters who frankly engage in prostitution, gambling, seduction for money and drinking.  A lesbian like Countess Geschwitz wouldn’t reappear in cinema for decades.  Even the (male) camera indulges in this license, lingering on women’s legs and breasts.   This story creates a wonderful, intriguing world.

And like Weimar itself, the story comes to a sad end.  Reduced to abject poverty in London, Lulu turns tricks to support herself, Alwa and Schigolch.  The last trick she picks up turns out to be penniless, but she flashes her trademark smile as her irrepressible generosity of spirit asserts itself, and she takes the man to the apartment anyway as Alwa suffers mental anguish below.  The trick turns out to be Jack the Ripper, and he kills Lulu.  As she is dying upstairs, the tormented Alwa, unaware of what has happened, abandons her and seeks salvation from his life by following a Salvation Army Christmas parade.  The levels of irony and melodrama in this closing scene give Pandora’s Box just the ending punch it deserves.