Louise Brooks’s famous bobbed hairstyle guaranteed her eternal inimitability, its razor-sharp aesthetic a marker of her essence. G.W. Pabst understood this, which is why when Brooks’s doomed flapper from Pandora’s Box flees a courtroom after a murder conviction, she cuts her hair to become almost unidentifiable—to be like other women, except perhaps for the curly-blond gal pal who longs for her affections. (One sign of the film’s coolness is its refusal to waltz Alice Roberts into the celluloid closet.) It’s an act of desperate self-preservation in a film wickedly chockablock with exciting displays of amorous exaltation and domination.
This 1929 German silent drama is a stirring vision of the world gripped by a sinister moral vice—a nosedive into a carnal abyss of despair lined with visionary chiaroscuro sights and thorny mythological reference. With a voracious Lulu at the gilded controls, the vibrantly in-the-moment Pandora’s Box evokes a thoroughly modern world trying to completely exorcise the vestiges of its serial sexual and historical perversities like a sweaty dry heave.
The triumph of Pandora’s Box is Lulu’s seduction of Dr. Ludwig Schön (Fritz Kortner) prior to a musical revue, a sick spectacle that begins with a diva tantrum and spirals into a chilling show of mind control, with Lulu laughing at Schön’s wife as she pecks the man on the lips—and in this moment, you may feel as if the face of evil looked so beautiful. Everyone else, from the man’s attractive son, Alwa Schön (Fritz Lederer), to the sniveling Rodrigo Quast (Krafft Raschig), will fall like dominos, but who exactly is doing the toppling here?
Turns out that Lulu, like Else Heller’s Mutter from Joe May’s Asphalt from the same year, isn’t totally rotten (her devastating dying gasp—a stirring act of contrition—suggests as much), though she does metaphorically embody the evils of the world. Pabst twist, though, is that Pandora’s box is already open and certainly not of her own accord. How to close it, as the film sees it, becomes a modern world’s ultimate ethical, self-reflective challenge.
Image/Sound
Criterion’s release of Pandora’s Box features a new transfer sourced from a 2K restoration that cannot fully eradicate the scratches and moments of blown-out contrast that one expects from most silent films. In that context, the overall quality of this transfer is a true marvel. Contrast has been deepened between the black and white levels, and the image remains stable in all but a few moments of irreparable celluloid decay that leaves a few seconds of footage washed out or overly murky. Per a comparison by DVDBeaver with Eureka’s recent Region B Blu-ray, it would appear that Criterion’s disc represents a substantial improvement even over that release, dialing back a few overly aggressive digital fixes while offering a generally sharper image.
Criterion offers a choice of four musical audio tracks that they commissioned for its 2006 DVD. Peter Raben’s Romantic orchestral score is the most contemporary, while Gillian Anderson crafts a historically informed score that approximates the presentations provided by silent-era theaters with in-house bands. Elsewhere, pianist Dimitar Pentchev gives a Weimar cabaret spin on the proceedings, while fellow pianist Stéphan Oliva offers a more improvisatory composition with many experimental flourishes that synchronize with the on-screen action and moods. The vastly different tonal experiences of each score allow one to re-experience Pandora’s Box from different angles based solely on what each piece of music evokes.
Extras
All of the extras here have been ported over from Criterion’s previous DVD release. On their commentary track, film scholars Thomas Elsaesser and Mary Ann Doane provide ample insight into both Pandora’s Box’s relationship to the source plays and their adaptations across media, as well as the careers of both G.W. Pabst and Louise Brooks. A 60-minute 1998 documentary on Brooks traces her career trajectory via interviews with friends and co-stars, and Brooks herself shares insights into her life and work in a 1971 interview. An additional interview with Pabst’s son, Michael, delves into the director’s career and the controversial manner in which he operated outside the prevailing expressionist tastes of Weimar cinema. The accompanying booklet contains a 1979 profile of Brooks by critic Kenneth Tynan, an essay on the film by critic J. Hoberman, and an article that Brooks wrote about her collaborations with Pabst.
Overall
A robust new transfer sheds new, much-needed light on G.W. Pabst’s masterpiece.
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