Die Büchse der Pandora

AVE 11 of 300:
Die Büchse der Pandora (1929)
Directed by G.W. Pabst

1. Die Büchse der Pandora is adapated by scriptwriter Ladislaus Vajada from two plays written by Frank Wedekand in the 1890’s: “Erdgeist” (Earth Spirit) and  “Die Büchse der Pandora” (Pandora’s Box).

2. Because this is a silent film, I decided to watch it along with commentaries by Thomas Elsaesser (author of Weimar Cinema and After) and Mary Ann Doane (author of Femme Fatale), which were part of the Criterion Collection edition. It was interesting how the two critics read the movie differently, coming from their respective interests and lenses. Nonetheless, the two agreed on one thing: the important contribution of Louise Brooks, who acted as Lulu, in the development of cinema and women representation in film and popular culture.

3. Being an American actress, Brooks playing a German role certainly aroused curiosity and criticism. The movie, in the end, did not receive critical and commercial success during its time. When Brooks and the film was reintroduced in the 1950’s, however, someone said that “there is no Garbo, no Dietrich, only Louise Brooks.”

4. In 1979, Kenneth Tynan wrote “The Girl in a Black Helmet,” a 20-page profile on Louise Brooks for The New Yorker that included a very detailed outline of the sequences in the movie. Tynan cited Henri Langlois, director of Cinematheque Francais, who earlier said that Brooks “is the modern actress par excellance… . She is the intelligence of the cinematic process… she embodies all that the cinema rediscovered in its last years of silence: complete naturalness and complete simplicity.”

5. There are not so many silent movies I’ve seen, but Pabst made me realize how the silence in a film gives weight to images and actions, which, if you’d think about it, is commonsense. But I don’t think I’ve realized what it means to really watch a film until I’ve seen ones like this.

~ by ecsamar on February 4, 2008.