J Paul Johnson
The Criterion Collection continues its upgrading of catalog content from its earliest DVD (and laserdisc) releases with this month’s Blu-ray edition of G. W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box from 1929. Unlike some that deserve, perhaps even necessitate, a 4K UHD release, the remaster of Pandora’s Box is pieced together from several disparate—and compromised—sources using modern digital tools. The result is excellent, even as one can see the logic in sparing the film the 4K treatment. The Blu-ray special edition, replete with all of the special features collated for Criterion’s 2006 DVD release, makes for one of Criterion’s best: a careful restoration of an important and immersive work of cinema contextualized by some of the best thinking and writing on the work to date—including perspectives from its sensational star and the son of its director.
The Austrian-born Pabst became one of the most important filmmakers of the Weimar Republic for many reasons, including his graceful cinematography and innovative editing, but above all, he knew talent: he’s credited with discovering and nurturing including Greta Garbo, Asta Nielsen, Leni Riefenstahl, and, to the point here, a Kansas showgirl named Louise Brooks. Without even so much as a stage name Brooks became virtually synonymous with the flapper era, her screen roles prominently displaying her signature bob (one of her nicknames was “The Girl with the Black Helmet”), lithe figure, piercing gaze, and, above all, her sexual allure.
Pandora’s Box sits at the intersection of silent and sound films, of European art cinema and Hollywood melodrama, of the outrageous and the sublime. Released a full year after the “talkies” swept the industry, it was at the time released to an underwhelming reception: film’s attention had simply done an about face, and if a film did not feature a significant amount of direct dialogue—actors talking—it did little box office. What filmgoers and critics overlooked was that Pandora’s Box, so deftly directed and expertly performed, was the apotheosis of silent cinema, an art form that had developed its own dextrous fluidity and aesthetic.
Brooks plays Lulu, a role with which the actor became synonymous, even titling her 1982 memoir Lulu in Hollywood. She’s a showgirl whose flirtatious, penetrating allure is so irresistible that nearly everyone in her orbit—young, old, male, female—is drawn to her. And Lulu is not at all oblivious to her devastating effect; in fact, she deploys it like a strategic weapon, using her sex appeal—and more bluntly, sex—to get what she wants, from whom she wants.
Based on two plays in turn based on the Greek myth of Pandora, a beauty who unleashed evils into the world, leaving behind only hope, Pabst’s Pandora’s Box is an efficient, riveting spiral of a narrative charting Lulu and her cohort’s rise and fall. (A modern reference might be Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream, even if its characters fall prey to other vices.) Lulu is mistress to a respectable newspaper publisher but scheming to earn herself a more secure station in life. Juggling her past “patron” (read: her John), potential lovers, her current lover, his son, and even a wealthy countess whose infatuation with Lulu is undeniable, Lulu orchestrates a series of events that soon spiral far out of her control.
These involve, in short order, a marriage of convenience, a killing, a trial, an escape, and later, a descent into trafficking and an encounter with the most notorious real-life serial killer of the era. It’s a plot that allows Brooks ample opportunity to display her considerable talent as a seductress but also to elicit the audience’s sympathy. To Pabst’s credit, her downward spiral in the film’s final acts does not play as a rebuke of moral turpitude but as a tragedy of epic proportions.
Pabst’s direction is as daring and stylish as his star, featuring all of the stylish camera movement, provocative close-ups, and associational editing the talkies would for a time seem to forget. The bulky sound equipment stilted camera movement, and dialogue-laden scenes often stunted narrative drive, at least for a time. Pandora’s Box is as good as silent melodrama gets, a stirring and emotional experience.
The remastering here is excellent, at least in light of the state of existing prints. No original negative nor original print of Pandora’s Box exists. Those prints extant today are duplications from the 1950s and ’60s, themselves struck from damaged material with significant imperfections. Three of these—a 1952 dupe from Paris, a 1964 dupe made in Prague, and a 1970 from Gosfilmond in Russia—were composited here, through the use of digital tools, to fill in gaps where frames or even full scenes were missing, with compositing tools used to match variances in grading, position, and other characteristics. The result is not perfect, but it’s nonetheless amazing, restoring Pandora’s Box to a grace that has probably not been witnessed since its February 1929 premiere.
Special Features
For this Blu-ray and DVD special edition of their spine No. 358, Criterion has replicated all of the supplementary content from its long out-of-print 2006 DVD release. Other than the remastered film itself, no new material has been commissioned for this edition. It’s difficult to imagine, though, what else in this case Criterion might provide, as that supplementary material is exhaustive and compelling, more than enough to sate even the most ardent cinephile’s appetite.
Four musical scores. Criterion has commissioned four separate and diverse scores for the film, creating a rich palette of aural experiences. An orchestral score by Gillian Anderson, a specialist of silent-film music who has scored films by D. W. Griffith and F. W. Murnau, is the default. It’s meant to approximate what a European cinema palace orchestra might have played for Pandora’s Box upon its debut. Dimitar Pentchev’s score is a more whimsical, innovative take, based on the music of a Weimer-era cabaret and echoing Kurt Weill to emphasize the film’s modernity. Peer Raben, who scored a number of Fassbinder’s films in the 1970s and ’80s, offers an even more modern take, one that accompanied the film’s appearance at the Berlin Film Festival in 1997. The fourth, Stéphan Oliva’s, is intended to remind modern viewers that most cinemas did not enjoy the luxury of a full orchestra and instead employed a single pianist or organist, often working up an extemporaneous improvisation, more impressionistic than orchestrated.
Audio commentary: By film scholars Thomas Elsaesser, author of Weimar Cinema and After, and Mary Ann Doane, author of Femme Fatale, share time on this insightful, education, and just occasionally a little spicy track, originally produced in 2005 for the DVD release. I am partial to hearing academic perspectives on the feature films as opposed to stars and directors shilling for their own product or reminiscing vaguely about their productions, I confess, but this commentary is exactly the kind of supplement great art like Pandora’s Box deserves.
Louise Brooks: Looking for Lulu: A 60-minute documentary by Hugh Munro Neely made for Turner Classic Movies in 1998, following the life of the iconic star through her on-screen fame to her later seclusion and public rediscovery. It’s quite good and features plenty of clips and stills from Brooks’ most famous years. Shirley MacLaine narrates.
Lulu in Berlin: A 48-minute documentary film featuring a rare longform interview with Brooks, conducted by Richard Leacock and Susan Steinberg Woll from Brooks’ Rochester, New York apartment in 1971, framed with lovely montages of her at work and archival content from the 1920s.
Interview with Richard Leacock: Thirty-five years after his 1971 interview, this short (five-minute) piece features Leacock reminiscing about the experience, recalling, among other details, that the actor negotiated for a $300 bank-check payment for the interview. on the actor’s allure and legacy.
- Note that each of the above special features are in English, with no SDH available.
Interview with Michael Pabst: This 34-minute interview with director G. W. Pabst’s son, an art gallery director and sometimes-scholar of his father’s work, is interspersed with stills and clips from the elder Pabst’s oeuvre. Michael Pabst undertook, but never was able to fully complete, a biography of his father’s life, and so makes for a thoughtful raconteur. This interview is conducted in German with English subtitles.
The packaging, featuring a new cover by Eric Skillman, also includes a trailer for the film and the same voluminous content as the 2006 DVD release, including a lavishly illustrated 98-page booklet with production notes, a comment on the four film scores, restoration credits, and three excellent pieces: Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman’s “Opening Pandora’s Box”; a reprint of Kenneth Tynan’s 1979 Sight and Sound article article on Brooks, “The Girl in the Black Helmet”; and a delightful excerpt from Brooks’ memoir Lulu in Hollywood, here titled “Pabst and Lulu.”
All told, the special features may simply replicate those from the out-of-print 2006 DVD release, but they are as thorough, detailed, and lively as one could want. There is no reason to my thinking why Criterion can’t provide subtitles for its commentary tracks and special features, especially when some lesser-known restoration and distribution companies are making full efforts to. Even so, the excellent remastering of the film, the very special quality of the feature itself, and the strength and variety of the supplements together make Criterion’s new Blu-ray special edition of Pandora’s Box well worth opening.
