tomgillespie2002 The journey taken by Georg Wilhelm Pabst's Pandora's Box to reach its status as a classic of Weimar German cinema is an interesting one. It received mild praise upon its release, but was shrouded in controversy due to its frank depiction of sexuality, even featuring one of cinema's first portrayals of a gay woman. The film was soon forgotten about, until it was re-discovered by a group of socialites and film enthusiasts in the 1950s - some close friends with star Louise Brooks - who heralded the film a masterpiece and set out to spread the word. Soon enough, Pabst's work was undergoing a revival, but this was overshadowed by the attention Brooks received. She was being talked about as an even more striking screen presence than the likes of Garbo and Dietrich, much to her amusement.The truth is, Pandora's Box would perhaps only be an okay movie without Brooks in the title role. A known party girl, she started as a flapper dancer and bit-part actress before she was signed to Paramount by producer Walter Wanger, catching the eye of Charlie Chaplin in the process. As the film roles came in, she developed a hatred for the Hollywood scene, and fled to Europe after being denied a pay rise. She was unofficially blacklisted in her homeland, but it would be in Germany that she would make the two movies that would cement her as a goddess of the silent era, Pandora's Box and Diary of a Lost Girl, both directed by the Austrian pioneer of the psycho-sexual melodrama, Georg Wilhelm Pabst. Both told a story of a care-free, and careless, woman brought down by a society that had different plans for her, and Brooks was the perfect face to channel such a dangerous force of nature.Here she plays Lulu, a young dancer and aspiring performer engaging in an affair with the soon-to-be-married newspaper publisher Dr. Ludwig Schon (Fritz Kortner). On the night of her performance as a trapeze artist, Lulu refuses to go on stage while Schon's fiancée is in the crowd, and kicks up such a fuss that he ends up marrying her instead. Events eventually force her to go on the run with Schon's son (Francis Lederer), and she finds herself in the hands of increasingly unscrupulous men as her naivety and promiscuity invite trouble. At over 2 hours, it's too long, but the film always holds your interest because of Brooks. Her performance is incredibly modern and playful, and there's something almost dangerous about her. Like a beautiful woman who is obviously nothing but trouble, you cannot help but be drawn in by Brooks' seduction. Pabst tastefully weaves a story of drama, tragedy and sexuality with an intense eroticism, but it is the star, with her perfectly symmetrical face and iconic bob hairstyle, who leaves the great impression.

Horst in Translation ([email protected]) "Die Büchse der Pandora" or "Pandora's Box" is a 1929 black-and-white silent movie, so this one is already over 85 years old. It stars Louise Brooks, a dark-haired actress, who is probably more known today than she was back then. Despite being American-born she starred several times in the films of Georg Wilhelm Pabst, one of Germany's top silent film directors. Unfortunately, I cannot appreciate this film here as much as most others do judging from the movie's IMDb rating. It has an interesting premise, especially taking into account when it was made, but that's also it pretty much. There are a couple fine scenes in here, but it's not even close to being enough for a film that runs considerable over 2 hours. I was pretty much bored by it I have to say and it also did not help that I found the main character very uninteresting despite how hard they tried to make her as interesting and controversial as possible. Then again, I am not the greatest silent film fan out there, so I may be a bit biased, but nonetheless there are a handful of films from the silent era that I managed to appreciate a lot more than this one. Then again, there's also some that I liked even less, such as the Mabuse film for example. As a whole, this may have been a much better watch at 80 minutes perhaps, but for this massive duration the material simply wasn't enough. An epitome of how quality does not match quantity. Not recommended.

Beginthebeguine Even in Louise Brooks own autobiography it is hard to tell where the character of Lulu ends and Miss Brooks begins. The picture of modern femininity in the late 1920s with her "flapper" pageboy haircut and sexuality. She stood against convention and paid the price for her modernity within the Hollywood structure. So, too, Lulu who makes her way through Pandora's Box as a modern woman who uses her sexuality to make a place for herself while ignoring the possible consequences of her actions. Does she care about these consequences--no--Lulu lives for the moment and even when it is time to pay the ripper at the end, she is unaware of the price she must pay. Certainly, as a film, it is the zenith of Pabst's work. Filmed during the end of the German Weimar era it begins to show the fraying of the moral liberality that would lead so many Germans to the acceptance of a Hitler Germany. Nevertheless, it a beautiful film where the image is the storyteller. The soft lighting on Lulu's face so captures the uniqueness of Louise Brooks beauty which is so unmarked by lines that it appears as a caricature rather that a living, breathing person. That is what Lulu is and that is perhaps why Miss Brooks was the perfect casting for this project and why she is so imagined as the character herself. For me, the final scene, as the Salvation Army marches off under the archway is the most spectacular. The lighting detail with rays of light extending from a window contrasted by the perfect amount of fog gives me goose flesh.

chaos-rampant Lulu is a social butterfly out for a good time, a femme who is fatale but only because the men lust after her so fiercely.Normally in film noir the femme fatale appears to us not so much a human being but an agent, a catalyst of some dangerous illusion. She is the wet dream from the private dick's perspective, desire personified. Hollywood probably took this up from Dietrich's persona in another German film, Blue Angel from the following year, the heartless diva who presents herself in a way that will satisfy her capricious whims.This is different though, and it is more stunning for this, the trick being that we see the world from the eyes of an innocent woman as she becomes shaped into a femme fatale. She is forced into the role and eventually plays it to perfection. The very fact that she is beautiful and sexy turns her into that prize that men would do anything to have. Film noir as we came to know it was about all these desperate efforts.It is still however film noir in the most incisive, essential way. Dual worlds linked by the turning of karmic wheels; from inside a cheerful, innocent woman who we know to be basically good and trying to live life, but who at the same time appears provocative, alluring, exuding sex, and therefore by her very nature, by the fact that she is the person she was born to be, seems to lull men into the kind of stupor where they can dream only her, a dream so intoxicating that in turn traps her in her image. The result is that she inhabits a different world than she weaves around her and, almost without exception, it's the jerk from one world to the other that yields the anxieties - from the private to the public, where a person is no longer himself but only the sum total of other peoples' views, and so an object of collective scrutiny or, as in our case, sexual paroxysm.So from her end life as a series of spontaneous, often inexplicable 'nows' but which we understand to be structured around her and unwittingly powered by herself. But from the other end life organized, and from their own ends again seemingly spontaneous, with the sole intent of having her. Men suddenly crave her - they don't know why, she doesn't - and will do anything, but who she also provokes without realizing, by simply being herself.This dual perspective that reverberates across the film, as much about the woman herself as both temptress and angelic swan, she can fit in both these roles as well as she actively pursues them, as about the swarm of men who surround her, at first pretending moral uprightness but finally more or less powerless before her charms, is ingeniously rendered in two scenes in particular.The first is set at the courthouse where she's at trial for murder; upon being pronounced guilty, her admirers quickly stage a commotion by setting off a fire alarm that allows them to extricate her. From the outside a chance emergency, the crowd dashing, clamoring, pushing for the exit, and from her end as well, unwitting, dumbfounded, in the middle of all this crowd being carried outside, but which we know was all orchestrated by the men who'd like to have her. Of course the fire alarm is about the fires of desire.The other is at a bar or gambling house where she has fled and is hiding for safety. A reward out on her name, various parties conspire to exploit the situation for a quick dime. Here, it is she who is spinning the most dazzling web of deceit - now improvising the role of the femme fatale on the spot, but out of pressing need. The most revealing game concocted by her: she petitions a man to gamble for her fortunes on a card table. He is winning, but of course is revealed that he was cheating all along.It ends with all these lives finally released from the grip of the karmic energies that have clasped them so tightly, the self- instructed destinies, each according to his own decree. The man who wishes he could eat Christmas pudding one more time gets to.Pabst orchestrates the finale as a dance of symbolic gestures; the most symbolic perhaps being that the woman had a heart of gold all along. We may had our doubts because she mingled with money, but now we know. The man doesn't to the end, this is the saddest destiny here. Of course at the cost of ever having her.