I once showed G.W. Pabst's 1929 film version of Wedekind's Lulu plays, Louise Brooks's starring vehicle Pandora's Box, to a graduate class at the University of Iowa. I was apprehensive; these were children of the television age, unfamiliar with the codes of silent movies, especially of German silents, the exaggerated gesture, the mask-like make-up, the distorted shadows. But I badly wanted to show them this great film about the unholy alliance between desire and money as part of a course about 20th-century narrative I'd titled, quoting from Thomas Wolfe, 'Life is strange and the world is bad'; nothing else but Pandora's Box would do.

LRB 8 March 1990 | PDF Download