Pandora's Box

G. W. Pabst's Pandora's Box (Die Büchse der Pandora) opened in 1929 and entered the upper tier of every Sight & Sound poll covering silent-era cinema. The film consolidated Louise Brooks — the American actress whom Pabst had cast against substantial advice from his German-cinema collaborators — as one of the most beloved central female-cinema presences of the silent era. Brooks's continuing reputation has been almost entirely sustained by this film and her subsequent Pabst collaboration Diary of a Lost Girl.

In late-Weimar-Germany Berlin, the dazzling, unselfconscious dancer Lulu (Louise Brooks) circulates through the early-1929 demi-monde that Frank Wedekind's source plays (the late-nineteenth-century Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora) had originally framed. The film follows Lulu through her continuing series of relationships and across the broader European geography that the Weimar-period source material had refined: a Berlin newspaper editor, a wealthy patron, the moneyed German theatrical world, and eventually the foggy London of the closing chapter.

The film's commitment to Brooks's central physical-performance register — her famous bobbed haircut became a continuing global fashion reference, and her direct-camera presence is widely cited as one of the most beloved silent-cinema images — produced a film that has steadily climbed in critical estimation across the decades. Günther Krampf's photography of late-Weimar Berlin and the closing London sequences is among the foundational works of late-silent-era cinematography.