Of Sexual Hate and Lonely Death: Pandora’s Box on Criterion

When what you write about is what you see/What do you write about when it’s dark?
~ Charles Wright

1. “You’ll have to kill me to get rid of me.”

Criterion’s October 2024 Blu-ray release of G. W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (1929), featuring a new 2K digital restoration, is a substantial upgrade of their 2006 DVD edition. As with their earlier issue, Criterion’s treatment of Pabst’s masterpiece is possibly the most luxuriant ever afforded a silent film on home video. Accompanying the crisp transfer of the recent restoration, the single disc retains from the earlier release the interview of Louise Brooks, Lulu in Berlin (1971), and the documentary, Louise Brooks: Looking for Lulu (1998); here, too, is 2006’s sizable booklet, which is itself a deep dive into the film and its star, with invaluable pieces from Kenneth Tynan, J. Hoberman, and Brooks herself. Finally, there are the four stellar music scores from which one can choose to accompany the film (to be discussed later).

Underneath the release’s mountain of special features lies the inevitable commentary. Here it’s performed by two staunch academics, Thomas Elsaesser and Mary Ann Doane, who each, at the outset, qualify their presence by announcing just how many years they’ve “worked” on Pandora’s Box. One’s been at it for twenty years, the other twenty-five, and, where two and a half decades may seem long to spend on, say, building a model ship, maybe it’s not excessive in getting acquainted with the likes of Pabst’s masterwork.

In serving up their discussion, Criterion has given us two very smart people who often deliver the goods, especially if you’re unfamiliar with the film. They are excellent at backgrounding the production, tying in the myth of Louise Brooks with the myth of Lulu, and at pointing out some of the myriad of nuances embedded in the flow of images. Even better, they excel at revealing the arc of the storyline and what makes its conclusion so compelling. But for a good half of the time, Tom and Mary spin off into the land of buzzwords and academic theorizing, giving us a strong dose of comparative media studies. Both these scholars are hell-bent on deconstructing the film, and there’s little joy in listening to them reduce a vibrant organic entity like Pandora’s Box to a theoretical – and largely rhetorical – object.

Does Pandora’s Box, like any powerful work of art, ultimately defy analysis or interpretation? It’s not enough to say that it doesn’t behave like an ordinary movie. Especially in its last act, Pabst reaches past the melodramatic storyline of his film to give us a profoundly tragic experience, the meaning of which is ultimately unknowable. For me, and I suspect for others, the ending of the film has an emotionally complex impact.

The most important contributing factor to Pabst’s conception, Louise Brooks, is one the director hadn’t full control over but was prescient enough to seek out. Without the 22-year-old actress, Pabst’s one-of-a-kind film could never have been made. Brooks became a true collaborator without knowing how or why, and as such she enabled the filmmaker to get the most out of his source, and then allowed Pabst, in a true coup du cinéma, to move past the narrow satirical focus of the Wedekind plays and, in the film’s final reel, enter the realm of poetry, or, further, into the rarefied territory of genuine tragedy, where our response to the inevitable, the irretrievable, is “beyond tears.”

Classic Greek tragedy speaks of a hero’s downfall, which culminates in a brutal event like murder. The hero’s fate is meant to give the effect of catharsis to the audience, a kind of paradoxical sense of emotional release coming from its witnessing the calamitous finality of the character’s end. Nietzsche called this effect the “pain that awakens pleasure.” In Pandora’s Box Lulu’s impulsive, perverse behavior, flying in the face of upper-middle-class conduct and morality, may appear to be the cause of her own obliteration. Like many a tragic hero, Lulu is simply oblivious to consequences – innocent, as in “innocent of.” Yet where often that hero’s fate can be viewed as a cosmic or societal comeuppance – i.e., this is what you get if you behave this way – Lulu’s death, at the hands of her last lover Jack the Ripper, has none of this. Pabst’s storytelling, his image-making, gathers to this moment, which continues to stir thoughts and emotions – our catharsis? – long after we’ve watched the film.

If Pandora’s Box doesn’t behave like most movies, then neither does it behave much like its source, the two “sex tragedies” by German playwright Frank Wedekind. The first of these, Earth Spirit, hit the boards around 1896, the second, Pandora’s Box, a few years later. Nowadays they are known as the “Lulu plays,” artifacts of a fin-de-siècle German Expressionism that survive mostly because of Pabst’s legendary film.

Yet by the Weimar era, Wedekind’s heroine had finally grabbed ahold of Teutonic sensibilities. Three silent films – Lulu (1917); a Hungarian Lulu, directed by Milhály Kertész (later Michael Curtiz and with Bela Lugosi); Die Büchse der Pandora (1919); and Earth Spirit or Lou (1923) – had adapted the plays before Pabst conceived his.1 In 1937 – four years after Hitler gained the chancellorship – Alban Berg’s unfinished twelve-tone serialist opera Lulu, based on the Wedekind plays, premiered in Zürich. It had been banned in Berlin and the Weimar experiment had failed, but Berg’s opera was composed in the midst of it, circa 1928-29.

In Pabst and Lulu2, Brooks mentions the 1923 Lou Lou/Earth Spirit film – starring the then famous Danish actress Asta Nielsen (she also starred in the 1919 effort). Describing it as a “moral prostitute film,” Brooks briefly describes its differences from Pabst’s conception, which she implies may have sunk the chances for his film’s success in Germany, because Pandora’s Box was not the film its audiences were prepared for. Essentially, they thought they’d be getting a Lulu like Asta Nielsen’s, not one played by an American girl.

Back at the turn of the century, Wedekind’s plays were satires of the bitterest sort, with the playwright intending to rip the lid off middle-class morality, introducing Lulu as an amoral girl who’s meant to be a symbol of primitive sexuality – the powerful, bestial force that rose from primordial muck long before man constructed God and a code of morality to go with Him.

Franz Wedekind, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

In a foreword to a 1906 edition, Wedekind tried to set things straight after several courts had placed Pandora’s Box under a ban. For one thing, he said, it was the judges’ mistake to focus on Lulu. As a female vortex sucking men to their doom, Lulu is a metaphor, not a character. The true tragic figure of the play is Countess Geschwitz, a self-sacrificing lesbian who, because of her “curse of abnormality,” lives outside the realm of bourgeois morality and therefore, because she genuinely loves Lulu, dies in a state of ennobled spirituality.

Wedekind’s Lulu may be a metaphor, but she sure talks a lot, as do the other characters, who all go around carrying the playwright’s messages like placards. Each play begins with a framing device, a prologue. In Earth Spirit, it’s a long monologue (in rhyming verse) for a lion tamer opening his circus act. His point: humankind is bestial, and everyone wants meat. Enter Lulu, who is told to just be herself; the men, with their insatiable lust, will take care of the rest. Four acts follow, in which Wedekind force-feeds us this dour, rather righteous sermon, the dramaturgy of which works against the sympathetic expression of a basic truth he intends – I think – to be liberating.

Pandora’s Box, Wedekind’s sequel, is a chore, too. We recognize most of Pabst’s characters, and the ending, with Jack the Ripper, is the same, yet very different. Lulu, as she murders or degrades all the men in her path, is paradoxically as innocent as the flowers, yet as she’s framed by Wedekind’s humorless dialog, she seems tough as nails and pretty damn knowing, a whore with a heart of pig iron. The Ripper kills quick and vicious. Only the Countess begs for our sympathies. She’s the last to die, and the message is clear: bourgeois morality kills. Throw primitive impulses into the mix – that is, have Lulu stride confidently into a room – and the whole tawdry, specifically male construct collapses.

Then, nearly thirty years later, we come to Pabst’s miraculous transformation. When Pabst placed a qualifying subtitle under his title – A Variation on a Theme by Frank Wedekind – he wasn’t kidding. Pabst didn’t so much adapt Wedekind’s material as reimagine it.

Where Wedekind began his Lulu plays with metaphorical setups, Pabst’s film begins in the middle of a scene. There is no setup – no bustling street shot to tell us We’re in modern Berlin. In a luxury Moderne apartment, Lulu flirts with an old man who has come to read the gas meter. The lighting is flat, the acting naturalistic. Lulu is no metaphor or force of nature, but simply a pretty girl who revels in her effect on men. The flirting is harmless, although the old duff seems to take it harder than he should when Lulu’s attention must go to Schigolch (Carl Goetz), another old man, who arrives smelling badly of cheap hooch – and of Lulu’s past.

As visualized by Pabst, Schigolch is a grotesque, Dickensian figure, a Fagin-like pimp from whose coop Lulu has flown straight into the enviable position of kept woman. But Lulu’s thrilled to see her former “daddy.” (Indeed, it’s possible he actually is her father.) When she leaps onto his lap, the director showcases the classic pimp/whore, father/daughter relationship, and the idea that Lulu is just another girl evaporates. But because the actress is so young, it’s easy to envision Lulu as a street kid falling into the clutches of a pimp like Schigolch, who would’ve given her a modicum of structure, security, even tenderness.

Once you realize that Lulu has spent her adolescent years as a prostitute, much of her behavior, especially her erotic positioning of men, becomes understandable. As writers and commentators point out, many of Lulu’s gestures are childish, but such regressive mannerisms come from Lulu’s deep-seated knowledge that this is what most men seek in a whore: childlike wantonness that’s easy to dominate.

The underworld of vice has been her home, and Lulu will instinctively gravitate to the familiar. No wonder she feels comfortable and chummy with both Schigolch and the rather undefined character, the pimp/acrobat Rodrigo, who Schigolch introduces to Lulu as a sort of impresario wishing to star her in a trapeze act. Having stepped over the threshold into the good life, Lulu sees no reason not to leave the door open for vagabonds. As the film progresses, these three create their own unholy society.

Lulu is brazen enough to introduce Schigolch to her current keeper, Dr. Schön (Fritz Körtner), as her first “patron.” Schön knows Lulu is the bringer of chaos – he tells his son, Alwa (Franz Lederer), as much – and Schön plans to avoid disaster through a marriage to a respectable middle-class girl. But it’s too late; Lulu’s got him. At some point, she tells Schön: “You’re going to have to kill me to get rid of me.”

2. “little breasts like pears”3

None of Lulu’s actions in the film – until her kindness toward Jack the Ripper in the final reel – demand sympathy. She is not that ancient melodramatic standby, the whore with the heart of gold. She is cunning and manipulating throughout. To get herself out of a jam in the penultimate act, she unhesitatingly takes advantage of the affections of her best friend. Each betrayal or deception merely allows her to survive, her one and only true goal.

In centering the ultimate tragedy on Lulu, how did Pabst manage to obtain sympathy for his anti-heroine? Blessed by instinct and epic good luck, Pabst found and secured Louise Brooks, and the task was largely completed for him. Film stars of that era, American or European, could be classed as either trained and from the stage, or untrained and from nowhere in particular. Brooks came from Kansas and had no experience on the boards, save from her time with the Denishawn dance company and a stint as a Ziegfeld showgirl.

On the cusp of twenty-two when she landed in Berlin, and resembling no European actress of her time, the American Brooks entered the German film’s production as an outsider, which is exactly how Lulu enters bourgeois society, as a creature who knows nothing of class, its rules, or its sense of order. As Louise points out in her interview with Kenneth Tynan, Pabst “[knew] even before he met me that I possessed the tramp essence of Lulu.”4

But Louise herself was no Lulu. As evidenced by the wealth of Brooksiana included in Criterion’s set, Louise was far too self-aware and reflective a person to wreak havoc in so blithe a fashion as Lulu. There’s no doubt that the young Louise was a party-girl extraordinaire, taking on men and booze and all-night hours with delight – and, after her career had deep-sixed, the resemblance of Brooks’s later life to Lulu’s shorter one, is chilling. For at least two decades, she survived only by being kept by a number of men. “Between 1948 and 1953, I suppose you could call me a kept woman,” Brooks told Kenneth  Tynan, “but then I was always a kept woman.”5

But on screen she couldn’t hide the native intelligence that allowed her, late in life, to become a brilliant writer about film, the rot and decay of the old Hollywood . . . and herself. To have this intelligence come beaming from her eyes, as Lulu allows chaos to erupt around her, is to give Brooks’s characterization a bristling contrariety that energizes the entire film. But smarts is just one of several complicating, often contradicting, factors that Brooks brought with her.

Her physical appearance was another, but let’s start with the haircut. Brooks’s Dutch bob wasn’t a hip fashion statement but merely how she’d always worn her hair, a relic of childhood. Along with her small breasts and slender build, the haircut gives Louise a whiff of androgyny, another factor in her appeal as a prostitute (again, think “child”), but it also positions Lulu as an exotic object, flitting about among Germanic “types.”

I like what the disc’s commentators have to say about what Brooks’s haircut owned in terms of sheer visual impact. Louise’s face, framed by dark hair, cut so precisely as to resemble a graphic symbol meant for nonverbal signage, was stunningly enhanced by black-and-white photography. Pabst recognized this visual aspect just as Hollywood did, and he knew how to use it – most pointedly, in a negative sense, in the gambling ship episode when he saps the Brooks image of power by sweeping Louise’s hair back from her face, eliminating her Dutch bob.

Asia Nielsen in Earth Spirit

In Pabst and Lulu, Brooks details how Pabst felt the need to engineer her haircut before filming even commenced. In the film Earth Spirit, Asta Nielsen had coincidentally worn her hair in a bob style that was cut quite similar to that of Brooks, and the director had wanted his Lulu to distance herself from Nielsen’s appearance.6 Brooks’s slim dancer’s body, quite different from the Danish actress’s zaftig figure, already achieved most of this – but then there was Nielsen’s hair. Initially, to create a contrast, Pabst put Brooks’s hair up in curls, but, realizing the effect it would have on her performance, ordered it back to its Dutch bob and relegated the curls to maximum effect in just that one shipboard sequence. In her subsequent films – except for scenes in Pabst’s Diary of a Lost Girl (1929) and her last supporting roles in two forgotten westerns, Empty Saddles (1936) and Overland Stage Riders (1938) – she retained the bob. If contemporary culture still considers Brooks an “icon,” it’s mostly due to a hairstyle.

But Louise wasn’t just any icon, and not just any girl: she was a girl from the American Plains, where screen doors slammed and echoed in the summer twilight and lovers met in the parlor. When she smiled at the camera, it could be with unadorned, Midwestern sweetness – here was the innocence Wedekind spoke of and Pabst actually got. Look at Louise’s performance as the good girl next door in the comedy The Show Off (1926); her projection of wholesomeness hasn’t an ounce of arch condescension. In Pandora’s Box, the Kansas teenager is still there in Lulu but melded to a new quality, the “childish simpleness of vice” – as Louise described it.7

Adding to this child-woman/whore quality, Louise brought an element of joy, even of ecstasy, to the role. This is not acting of any sort; it’s innate sexual energy – Marilyn Monroe had it, of course, and further back in time, so did the early silent actress Olive Thomas. Energy like this is uncontrollably life-affirming, working against the death-wish concept of the femme fatale, or the vamp, that is, the vampire. Louise’s mere presence clears the air of Wedekind’s sexual morbidity. Mixing her self-aware sexuality in with the out-of-date Wedekind content gives the rancid satire a fresh modern context and at the same time allows sympathy for Lulu. Especially for a current audience, Louise projects a healthy sexuality that puts a contrary spin on Lulu’s man-eating manipulations.

It was Pabst’s genius to have Louise act with her whole body, thereby setting free these innate qualities. In her filmed interview with Richard Leacock, Lulu in Berlin, Louise describes her movements in the film as simple choreography, and this easily makes sense watching her move across a room, sit on a sofa, or leap on a man’s lap. Even in close-up or medium shots, though, you remember her statement that she learned acting from Martha Graham and dancing from Charlie Chaplin.

On another of Criterion’s special features, the documentary Looking for Lulu (1998), the composer David Diamond speaks of how her acting took place between the middle of her forehead and a point somewhere near her breastbone. Diamond’s point seems vague, but he’s on to something. The camera catches, he continues, something happening between her shoulders and her neck. Intuitively, Diamond is reaching right to the heart of what makes Louise great on screen: her graceful physicality – graceful and at the same time strong and disciplined. With her long neck and spine as a flexible armature, the upright but extremely fluid carriage of her upper body gives Louise enormous poise and control, supporting and further projecting the expressiveness of her face. There’s no doubt she’s learned this balanced control from her experience as a professional dancer. Barry Paris calls her acting technique “unmannered plasticity – which was essentially the absence of technique.”8

Of course, for all her male bourgeois admirers, Lulu is a sexual object, and Pabst drives this home in the segment set in the backstage of Alwa’s musical review. Teasingly he pushes images of Louise in varying states of partial nudity. For much of the segment, Louise is clothed in a showgirl outfit that offers extensive peek-a-boo shots of Louise’s legs, her back, and her magnificent poitrine, the latter affording us, as Dan Callahan, in his superb piece on Brooks in Bright Lights, says, “a mouthwatering view of her small, firm breasts.”9 Their role in this scene is undeniable, and Pabst wants us to ogle them.

When, in the same segment, Schön’s fiancée catches sight of a partially nude Lulu being helped into her costume, we share with her the shock of naked skin, the skin – the fiancée realizes – that her future husband is so very familiar with. For the rest of us, Louise’s beautiful back becomes a glimpse of that wondrous reality, her rounded yet muscular dancer’s body. A studio photograph from 1928 shows a nude Brooks holding an elegant choreographed pose that reveals well-defined abdominal muscles and sturdy athletic thighs. In the history of cinema, Louise’s physique and beauty were simply non-generic, unique.

Confronting a querulous Lulu in a backstage prop room, Dr. Schön is helplessly seduced by her girlish tantrum (which features Louise flexing the muscles of her bare back and legs), leading to the film’s erotic pivot, the shot of Lulu rising triumphantly over the prone body of Schön – as fiancée and son look on.

Louise’s face, gazing straight at the fiancée, is like that of a lioness, her mouth still bloody from the carrion beneath her, announcing to the hyena, “Back off. This is mine.” The bestial, smirking rawness of this gaze might’ve pleased Wedekind and his lion tamer; it works in well with their view of the human sexual drive with its craving for “meat,” but here it announces the fate of Pabst’s Lulu without wasting a single word.

David Diamond shows deep insight into Brooks’s 40+-year descent from major stardom when he says, “Her strength annihilated her.” As she wields her body to overwhelm Schön’s grasp on propriety, you could say the same of Brooks’s Lulu. Having turned the tables on Schön, Lulu has disrupted the delicate order of bourgeois sense and structure with the unseemly spectacle of a whore dominating her master. Schön recognizes this and makes the fatal error of attempting to repair the damage through a sanctified marriage to Lulu, which worsens the tragic societal dislocation. Only disaster may follow.

3. Sexual Hate

Louise, who idolized her mentor and slept with him once, accused Pabst of being aroused more by sexual hate than by sexual love. Thereby, she says, Dr. Schön, as played by Fritz Körtner, becomes the director’s alter ego in Pandora’s Box. Louise could see that Körtner despised her and that Pabst exploited the bad vibes while shooting their scenes. What you see is what you get. When Schön gazes at Lulu, it’s clear he loathes her. “In the role of Dr. Schön, Körtner had feelings for me,” said Brooks, “that combined sexual passion with an equally passionate desire to destroy me.”10

Like Brooks, Körtner gives an astonishing physical performance. Louise mentions his powerful back and shoulders, of which Pabst took advantage when shooting encounters between Schön and Lulu. Gloomy and inward during much of his performance, Körtner – though not much taller than Louise – can loom large when aggravated by Lulu. It was all in the director’s framing, which would transform the actor’s beefy torso into an unyielding mass of brute force. Even when calm, though, Schön is every bit the capitalist thug in his immaculate suits, throwing off fumes of male entitlement like pheromones. He’s driven to dominate everything he touches, but sexual desire undoes Schön. Desire, as it seeks to dominate, dominates the dominator.

Dr. Schön goes down ignominiously on his wedding day. For a time, the lively reception at the newlyweds’ apartment appears to proceed swimmingly – until Schigolch and Rodrigo crash the party and the Countess Geschwitz begins a torrid tango with Lulu. Here’s where Schön’s monocle fogs up and events begin to turn sour and murderous.

As Schön busts up the unseemly Sapphic display in the living room, Schigolch, drunker than usual and accompanied by Rodrigo, demands to spread roses on the connubial bed. When Lulu goes to check on the two, the three reunited demimondaines pop open the champagne and throw their own party in the bedroom. Elsewhere, much of the film’s lighting design has been on the naturalistic side – anyone expecting an Expressionist tour de force will be disappointed with most of Pabst’s comparatively banal interiors. This holds true with the lighting of the party as the guests eat, drink, and dance in the apartment’s public spaces. But as a celebration of vice begins inside the bridal chamber, the director goes full tilt with the chiaroscuro and casting of malevolent shadow.

Schön enters to find his bride perched on the lap of Schigolch. When Schön orders her toxic friends to clear out, Rodrigo makes the mistake of threatening him, whereupon Schön produces a revolver, and with the aggrieved bridegroom right behind them, the two run out in terror, discombobulating the guests and effectively ending the reception.

Meanwhile, dreamy, gentle Alwa enters and declares his love for his stepmother, but is it really Oedipal sex that he wants from her? Within a gorgeously soft-focus shot of the seated Brooks in her shimmering white gown, Alwa goes to bury his head in her lap. It appears he’s after nurture, and though Louise is never more beautiful than in this shot, Lulu’s lap is a disastrous place to go looking for mommy. Here Alwa secures his own rueful destiny with Lulu. Schön once again enters, this time to find Lulu tenderly stroking Alwa’s hair, and, while controlling himself until his son leaves the room, approaches his bride with blood in his eye.

Lulu, unfazed by her new husband’s anger and rapid recourse to violence, has begun to undress languorously before a full-length mirror, in which she’s joined by Schön looming next to her. It’s a provocative sight. Men themselves are like mirrors for Lulu, reflecting her power over them, but among the remains of her last day she will meet the one man, Jack the Ripper, who is no such mirror.

With no warning, Schön wrenches Lulu away from the mirror and backs her up against a wall to convince her that she must cease to exist. Modeled by extreme light and dark, Körtner is a golem-like monster lunging at Lulu with terrific force.

Pabst meaningfully blurs the circumstance of Schön’s death. Wedekind, too, has Schön place the revolver in Lulu’s hands and ask her to kill herself, but his Lulu forcefully detaches herself from Schön and, from a short distance, cold-bloodedly fires five shots into him. Brooks and Körtner instead engage in an intimate struggle, with Lulu frantically rejecting the revolver (or penis, as some suggest) that Schön is adamant she take. As soon as the camera’s positioned behind Körtner’s back, it won’t show us the shooter until Schön lurches away. The circumstance of the gun firing is thus ambiguous, but Lulu’s puzzled demeanor strongly suggests self-defense, or merely accident. The scene is also a visual wonder, in a sequence full of them.

When the gun goes off – necessarily in silence – smoke wafts gently upward from Schön’s torso. As we still see only his back and Lulu’s quizzical expression, our split-second reaction may be that Schön’s fury, like that of some mythical being, has caused him to catch on fire.

It’s an authentic surreal image, right up there with Cocteau’s smoldering Beast or early Buñuel images. In a sound film, the effect would be spoiled by the necessitated crack of the gunshot, which would at once deliver the source of the rising smoke and cause many to jump in their seats. But like Lulu’s demise, Schön’s death is purely visual, drawing us into the strangeness of the smoke, followed by the near operatic nightmare of the death struggle. At one point as Körtner staggers about, the top of Pabst’s framing ends at his shoulders, and Schön becomes a headless giant, or damaged robot, another vision of phantasmic horror. Gurgling a single trickle of dark blood from the corner of his mouth, Schön dies in Alwa’s arms, and never has chocolate syrup been used so economically and to such unnerving effect.11

4. The Way Down

After her murder trial, from which Lulu has eluded custody and sentencing, Alwa returns home to find her arisen from a hot bath. He shudders at the sight of the seemingly oblivious girl, naked under her bathrobe, spinning giddily about in the very room where his father died so luridly by her hand. Yet Lulu’s behavior is not really so reckless and impulsive. Her survival instinct, which will fail her in the last act, has already kicked in: the very minute on entering the apartment after her escape, she notices Alwa’s passport and instantly recognizes it as her exit visa from inevitable imprisonment.

Alwa’s seduction is accomplished in a snap, and the two hit the road, or rather the rails. The following two sequences, which build to the finale in the London slums, depict Lulu’s return to the underworld, where Lulu largely ceases to be an object of desire and becomes an object to barter or sell. The disc’s commentators skillfully explain her relationships to the film’s two societies, the bourgeoisie and the demimonde. The former, if I may paraphrase, wants to fuck her; the latter wants to sell her.

The train trip lasts only long enough for Lulu and Alwa to fall into the clutches of a con-man/pimp, the Marquis Casti-Piani, who recognizes Lulu as the media darling who’s publicly fled from an indictment for manslaughter. With the bounty for aiding capture set at 5,000 marks, Casti-Piani immediately reduces Lulu to a bargaining chip. Threatened with disclosure, Alwa, after swiftly emptying his pockets of cash for the Marquis, agrees that he and Lulu will join him at his seaside villa.

A brisk location change brings us to a murky harbor at night where the villa turns out to be an anchored two-masted ship that doubles as gambling emporium and whorehouse. By now, all of us, audience and fictional characters alike, doubt that Casti-Piani is really a marquis.

Lulu’s buddies Schigolch and Rodrigo have joined her, of course, and late one evening, the Countess Geschwitz, the group’s fourth musketeer, comes shipside to seek out Lulu. Geschwitz, played by Belgian actress Alice Roberts, is the only Wedekind character not substantially altered by Pabst and his screenwriter. Either Roberts effectively underplays the role, or Louise’s memories are correct and Pabst cleverly utilized the actress’s strong aversion to playing a lesbian, allowing Roberts’s visible discomfiture on the screen to read as Geschwitz’s repressed but passionate attachment to Lulu. Place Roberts alone in a crowd of party guests and she looks lost and utterly alone.

The Countess is the only person in the film who unequivocally loves Lulu, and Pabst has given her a courageous outburst in the trial sequence when, during the break before sentencing and in front of a mob of onlookers, she screams at the prosecutor: “Where would your wife be if she had been brought up in cheap cafés!?” If we may read “café” as “brothel,” this is the only moment in the film that Pabst, whose politics favored the left, risks billboarding Lulu’s dilemma as a rise and fall from and to prostitution – with the blame going to society at large. The film seems to slant in that direction – and I’m sure Pabst would personally cast such blame – but elsewhere the filmmaker embeds his liberal conscience within the visual fabric.

But the outcry does highlight Geschwitz’s deep-seated understanding of Lulu’s outlaw status; as a lesbian, the Countess is one herself. Below decks of the ship, she quickly finds that life has been a downward spiral for Lulu and Alwa, who is no pro at making a living playing cards. At the gaming table, we see that Pabst, with deliberate purpose, has had Louise’s hair swept from her face and partially curled. Practically, it’s an attempt to disguise the graphically recognizable fugitive, but it’s decidedly more than that. Without her “black helmet,” Lulu is somehow made to appear little more than an ordinary, reasonably attractive young woman, glammed-up for a party but sporting an unfortunate haircut. With just a bit of hairdressing she’s been rendered small, vulnerable, and bereft of power.

Casti-Piani is poised to sell her to an Egyptian brothel owner, while Rodrigo wants her to finance his new theatrical venture, or else. Both men hang the promise of reward money to themselves over her head, and, as time runs out, Lulu ruthlessly uses Geschwitz’s devotion to extricate herself from Rodrigo’s bullying. When all hell breaks loose as Alwa is caught cheating at cards, Schigolch, Lulu, and Alwa use the confusion to escape. The conniption brings the police, who find Geschwitz screaming over the corpse of Rodrigo, who’s been murdered either by Schigolch or the Countess herself, another violent death hidden from the viewer. It’s the last we see of Geschwitz.

5. Christmas Eve

The film’s last chapter opens with Lulu’s death angel, Jack the Ripper (Gustav Diesel), materializing out of a night fog to pause at a window and peer in at a well-fed middle-class family celebrating around a Christmas tree. When Jack continues on his way, he encounters a group of homeless people clustered around a pretty Salvation Army maiden handing out food and presents. Unaccountably, Jack joins them. It’s Christmas Eve.

Wedekind, too, had Lulu die on Christmas Eve, and the significance of this was not lost on Pabst, who uses yuletide images to drive his tragedy deeper into our hearts. Pabst rams the spirit of Christmas – the “hopes and fears of all the years” – up against desperate urban poverty and, with the entrance of Jack, the threat of random psychotic violence. Jack’s expressive eyes lock with those of the young Army woman, and he empties his pockets for the charity’s brass pot. In return – “we take only to give to others” – the woman thrusts a sprig of mistletoe and a candle into the Ripper’s hands.

We’re feeling heartsick already. Peering up at the tall imposing figure, the little Army maid has trouble gauging the nature of the Ripper’s intense gaze, but she settles on it being down and out and lonely. Maybe she’s a bit attracted to him, too – is this how he lures his victims into the shadows? As Louise was not shy to point out, Diesel had more sexual charisma than any other male in the picture. But the Ripper leaves the maiden be – he’s in a funny mood tonight.

Away from the meandering Ripper, we find Lulu, Alwa, and Schigolch still together, living in a wretched garret. Tellingly, Lulu and Schigolch seem resigned to living on the bottom – after all, they’re both simply back where they started. While Lulu bustles about seeing what she can muster in terms of food, Schigolch sits contented with a bottle. But that delicate bourgeois dreamer, Alwa, is bundled up on the bed, deep in depression. Pabst heightens the impression of the room’s bleak poverty with set dressing and a well-considered nuance: Alwa covers himself for warmth under a pile of newspapers; Wedekind dictates a rug.

Alwa is too far gone to notice that Lulu has begun to comb her now greasy hair (back in its Dutch bob) and to apply makeup. She knows what she must do, and so does Schigolch, who, ever Fagin-like, teases her about it: “Why all the paint? We like you just the way you are.” Alwa remains clueless but follows them out the door, finally catching on when a man accosts Lulu on the curb. When Alwa pulls Lulu away from the john, Schigolch regrets it. “Too bad,” he says, “I’d have liked to taste Christmas pudding once more before I die.” At this, the morose Alwa retreats with Schigolch, and Lulu walks farther into the fog to ply her trade.

Prostitutes were the target for the historical Ripper, but Jack doesn’t approach Lulu; instead, looking more like a child than ever – especially under Diesel’s towering presence – she solicits him and brings him home, and at this point many in a Weimar audience might anticipate the film ending on a lurid, titillating note with a Lustmord (sex crime). In ’20s Berlin, Lustmord was a media-fed phenomenon catering to a public hungry for vicarious erotic thrills.12 There were myriad newspaper accounts of vicious murders featuring genital mutilations, along with books, plays, paintings, and what have you. The image of Jack the Ripper, which was fresh when Wedekind wrote the plays in the 1890s,13 had entered popular culture by the Weimar era. There were comic “Jack the Ripper” routines in Berlin cabarets, featuring nude victims.14

Some Berlin filmgoers might’ve even found themselves getting a bit aroused as Brooks led Diesel up a dark Expressionist staircase. Imagine their surprise when Louise literally disarms the Ripper with her prairie smile. As she offers herself for free, Jack drops his knife, and by impulsively breaking a cardinal rule of prostitution – her pimp would not approve – Lulu has committed her last transgression.

Inside the desolate garret, we might as well be back in a Kansas parlor, as Lulu and Jack the Ripper become girl and boy on a sweetly shy first date. Diesel is superb here, maintaining an edgy air of psychosis that at times miraculously translates into awestruck wonder at Louise’s vision of girlish beauty. The attraction is mutual. The visible chemistry between the two actors is another instance of Pabst’s incredible luck – even on set, Diesel and Brooks couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Their characters, Jack and Lulu – both tramps from outside the gates of bourgeois Eden – are made for each other, chthonic sweethearts.

A tender celebration of Christmas precedes the inevitable. When Jack extends his hand to her, petite Louise goes to perch on Jack’s lap. He looks at her with the gaze of an administrating angel, or with the eyes of an ordinary Joe thinking to himself, “Ain’t I lucky?” Playfully, Lulu retrieves candle and mistletoe from Jack’s coat and slips off his lap to light the candle. Crouching down level to the tabletop, she pauses to silently gaze into the flame.

Now the mood is hushed, nearly reverential, as if Lulu harbors a prayer on this night of nights. Pabst, who has been stingy throughout with pictorial effects, allows a final soft-focus close-up of Brooks’s face meditating on the candle’s soft light. Within it she is no longer a whore or man-eater. This crushingly beautiful shot of Brooks represents the zenith toward which, in an adverse ratio to her downward spiral to degradation, our affections for the lost girl have risen.

Lulu turns from the candle to give Jack a questioning, pleading look, and the killer once again offers his lap. Jack brings the mistletoe above her head, and as soon as the two embrace under it, Jack sees the knife, kisses Lulu, and the murder happens quickly. Here’s the anticipated Lustmord but with crucial differences that distance the act from its prurient norm. Like Schön’s and Rodrigo’s deaths, its violence is shielded from us, as the camera only takes in the Ripper’s back, with Lulu’s arm still gripping it in their embrace – when Jack penetrates her with the knife, there is no struggle, no convulsing. Her hand falls from its grip like that of a child going to sleep, and we know she’s gone.15

It’s more euthanasia than violent murder, this slipping away from existence, and there’s a chilly sense of nothingness, of real death, in this image of Lulu’s falling hand. But the full tragic truth of that image, its full import, finds completion, or rather a dark sort of radiance, in the film’s next and last scene.

Down on the street, a numb, dejected Alwa slouches at the doorway. He sees Jack leave, and the reality of what he thinks just happened hits home. The man in the wide-brimmed hat has just had paid for sex with Lulu. Jack glances at Alwa, but the killer’s face is devoid of expression; he doesn’t mind being seen. Jack’s love scene with Lulu was a hallucination, the Ripper’s true nature has reasserted itself, and he’s back in the game, a dutiful cog in the universe.

After he watches Jack disappear into the fog, Alwa begins to sob uncontrollably, and they’re hot tears, not for Lulu but for himself. It’s a fine moment for Lederer: even without sound you can hear his wailing in the face of inadequacy and hurt manhood.

A disjoint like this – the self-involved youth crying tears of self-pity while unaware of the stilled body upstairs – sharpens the perspective on futility and death. Lulu won’t live on in the hearts of any loved ones; there will be no graveside tears. Schigolch will likely do nothing more than dispose of the corpse. If Alwa lives to remember her, it will be as the whore who killed his father. Pabst wields this dramatic irony with the power of Shakespeare. There’s now an unbridgeable gulf between the tragic event and any redeeming conclusion to it.

And there’s nothing cheaply ironic in the sight of Alwa’s cluelessness, which is cleansed of it by the quiet, non-lurid nature of Lulu’s death. Imagine how different the effect if Pabst had intercut shots of Alwa leaning morosely in the doorway with quick edits of Lulu struggling and screaming as the Ripper bleeds the life out of her. Accordingly, with Lulu given up silently to oblivion, we don’t hate Alwa for his egoism; we empathize with his youth, his inexperience, and his pain – he’s doing what he must do, just as the Ripper did.

But what about Lulu? Pandora’s Box is a tragedy, and Lulu, abandoned by her companions, must die utterly alone. With no violence and no mourners, it’s a death so calm and devoid of theatrics that our feelings are confounded at first, but then – what is death? – suffused with a sense of boundless expanding emptiness, like what you see looking up into a winter’s clear, depthless night sky.

In negating hope, even bleakness can be sentimental and comforting, but Lulu’s lonely death provides something much more open-ended and an unusually potent moral object to take from a film: a truth in the form of an unanswerable question.

The film’s final dissonance rounds the corner in the form of the Salvation Army in procession, with the poor and homeless trailing them; behind it all comes a donkey-pulled cart with a lighted Christmas tree swaying within it. The female leader – could it be the Ripper’s sweet benefactor? – dips, then raises the Salvation Army’s flag in a militant show of the power of charity and giving. Gillian Anderson’s score has the band play “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing,” which contains the words “God and sinners reconciled,” but Lulu the sinner is a corpse surrounded by darkness. God and reconciliation occur in brightly lit churches and beside warm beds.

A couple of doors down, in a grungy tavern, Schigolch receives his Christmas pudding – for free – and Alwa has no choice but to fall in behind the wobbly cart and its Christmas tree, leaving behind the dead girl and the truth occasioned by her still hand.

* * *

The Scores

Criterion, in a generous acknowledgment of the importance of music to silent film, offers the viewer a choice of four different scores to accompany Pandora’s Box. All of them are thoughtfully composed, improvised, or arranged, and they’re vividly recorded.

Stéphan Oliva’s improvisatory solo piano score is the modest accompaniment with which, since the dawn of cinema, so many people have experienced silent film. Oliva’s improvising is noodling in the jazz sense, although the results don’t resemble jazz until he briefly references the swing of pop jazz from the 1920s; these, I think, are the best moments in his playing. In his statement of intent for Criterion’s booklet, he also mentions a nod toward Berg’s opera Lulu. Wandering about with simple chording and a few low-profile motifs, the pianist follows the action instinctively.

Dimitar Pentchev’s so-called “Cabaret” score is performed by a small group that’s perhaps meant to sound like a pit band in a Weimar-era nightclub. Including piano, guitar, saxophone, violins, cello, drums, it’s a combo much kinder to my ears than a solo instrument. The music only occasionally mimics the period’s pop, though; just as it should, it skillfully underscores the mood of the action. In the final act, the tension of Jack the Ripper’s imminent meeting with Lulu is carried quite effectively by a simple, insistent ostinato from the bass. (What would film scores do without the ostinato?)

Gillian Anderson’s is an orchestral score made up of stitched-together fragments of light classical (and not so light classical) pieces and a few pop tunes of the era. Mostly the mix works very well, but at two key moments in the film she makes, to my ears, a critical error in judgment. For these violent, yet mysteriously cryptic, scenes – Dr. Schön’s fatal confrontation with Lulu and then her death at the hands of the Ripper – she directly quotes two themes from Tchaikovsky’s fantasia overture Romeo and Juliet (1869: rev. 1870 and 1880). Mostly she uses the allegro giusto theme that the composer meant to express the conflict between Shakespeare’s Capulets and Montagues; but then we hear (only in the former scene) the easily identifiable music for Friar Lawrence.

Tchaikovsky’s tone poem has its own musical narrative, which essentially moves from agitation and anguish to gentleness and passion and, finally, to the pathos of the lovers’ deaths. The piece used to have a firm place in the cultural zeitgeist; many people at least recognized its love theme, but these days Romeo and Juliet is rarely performed by American orchestras. In my adolescence, though, recordings were abundant and I adored this music, which I can still hear vividly in my brain. So, when I encounter it in Pandora’s Box I’m following the music’s narrative as well as the film’s, so that as Schön thrusts the pistol in Lulu’s hand, I’m simultaneously waiting for the music of the warring houses to modulate into that of the balcony scene, which frustratingly for my inner ear doesn’t happen. This presents a visual/auditory dislocation that undercuts the emotional power of those two scenes.

In arranging public domain classical music for a silent film underscore, Anderson is not breaking any rule or law. Back in the silent era, accompanying pianists, or arrangers of orchestral scores, would source with abandon the 19th-century classical canon. The original score for Birth of a Nation lifted Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries for its final set piece, the Klan’s ride to rescue the two Daughters of the South.

I find Wagner’s piece a disjoint for Birth as well, but I feel Anderson’s use of Tchaikovsky’s for Pabst’s film an even worse idea. The Romeo and Juliet music simply has too much content of its own to be an obliging, obedient partner to the film’s exquisitely modulated visuals, which have their own pulse and flow. These are severely upstaged by the jagged metronomic force of the Russian composer’s allegro.

Peer Raben’s modernist orchestral score may be the best of the batch. Raben (1940-2007), a German film composer who was to Fassbinder as Nino Rota was to Fellini, seems to have delivered a newly composed original score – although I believe I heard a swatch of Swan Lake deftly interpolated (more Tchaikovsky!) whenever Schön’s young fiancée appears. Mostly Raben seems to be composing in the world of Arnold Schönberg and Alban Berg, possibly even Kurt Weill. In the film’s first scene, the score is often atonal and lugubriously gloomy and loud, but then as the film proceeds, it quiets down when it should and sounds authentic and appropriate. Best of all, he handles both sequences discussed above with delicacy, allowing Pabst’s image-making to fully breathe. In the end I found his music best accompanies the film’s emotional breadth, not to mention its avant-garde achievement.

Works Consulted and Cited

Brooks, Louise. Pabst and Lulu. Article included in booklet accompanying Blu-ray release of Pandora’s Box. Criterion Collection, 2024. Originally published in Sight and Sound, Summer, 1965, then included in monograph, Lulu in Hollywood by Louise Brooks. Alfred A. Knopf, 1982.

Gordon, Mel. Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin. Feral House, 2006.

Louise Brooks: Portrait of an Anti-Star. New York Zoetrope, 1986.

Paris, Barry. Louis Brooks. Doubleday, 1989.

Tynan, Kenneth.  The Girl in the Black Helmet. Article included in booklet accompanying Blu-ray release of Pandora’s Box. Criterion Collection, 2024. Originally appeared in the June 11, 1979 issue of the New Yorker.

Wedekind, Frank. The Lulu Plays & Other Sex Tragedies, translated from the German by Stephen Spender. Calder and Boyars, 1973.