Pandora's Box

G. W. Pabst's Pandora's Box (Die Büchse der Pandora) opened in 1929 and sits in the upper tier of every Sight & Sound poll covering silent cinema. Pabst cast the American actress Louise Brooks against a good deal of advice from his German collaborators, and the film made her one of the best-loved female presences of the silent era. Her reputation still rests almost entirely on this film and her second for Pabst, Diary of a Lost Girl.

In late-Weimar Berlin, the dazzling, unselfconscious dancer Lulu (Louise Brooks) moves through the early-1929 demi-monde, a world first sketched in Frank Wedekind's source plays (the late-nineteenth-century Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora). The film follows her through a series of relationships and across the wider Europe that Pabst took over from Wedekind and updated: a Berlin newspaper editor, a wealthy patron, the moneyed world of German theatre, and the men and women drawn in behind them.

Everything rests on Brooks's physical presence. Her bobbed haircut became a fashion reference around the world, and her direct, open gaze into the camera is among the best-loved images of silent cinema; the film's critical standing has climbed steadily over the decades as a result. Günther Krampf's photography of late-Weimar Berlin and its nightlife counts among the foundational achievements of late-silent cinematography.