by Mario Cardenas ·
Friday, August 21, 2026
Western culture has been largely created, to the exclusion of other voices, from a male perspective. In “Works and Days,” which precedes the story of Adam and Eve in the Bible, the Greek poet Hesiod introduces the myth of Pandora’s Box. Pandora was the first mortal woman, married to the brother of Prometheus, who had stolen fire from the gods. Given stewardship of a box (originally a large urn) containing the evils of the world, Pandora’s curiosity caused her to open the urn or box with the ensuing pandemic of all bad things. The gods’ anger at mortals accessing their proprietary knowledge is foisted on Pandora and subsequent women, now the source of the troubles that beset humankind.
I came upon G.W. Pabst’s terrific silent film, “Pandora’s Box”, via Daniel Kehlmann’s 2023 novel, “The Director,” a reimagining of the acclaimed Weimar director’s unhappy exile in Hollywood and subsequent work in Austria under the Third Reich. Pabst is credited with discovering Greta Garbo, whom he cast in “The Joyless Street” in 1925, and Louise Brooks, whom he cast in “Pandora’s Box” in 1929, deeming a 24-year-old Marlene Dietrich too erotically mature. An American actress, Brooks played the tragic Lulu, a character adapted from the Frank Wedekind plays, “Earth Spirit” and “Pandora’s Box,” which critiqued the bourgeois mores of fin de siecle Germany.
In Brooks, perhaps a more malleable talent, Pabst found the perfect embodiment of attraction and danger. Her casting, however, was not without controversy, since many Germans deemed her unworthy of a role seen as a Teutonic birthright.
“Was Louise Brooks a great artist or only a dazzling creature whose beauty leads the spectator to endow her with complexities of which she herself was unaware? The answer is that Louise Brooks was a great artist, and a dazzling creature, whose art was so invisible that the cinema screen became a tabula rasa upon which the deepest and most constant elements of human society could be projected: ideas of love, sexual desire, erotic pleasure, possession, and death. And it is this that is the source of her enduring appeal.”
—Robert Farmer, British filmmaker, critic.
For today’s viewers the silent era seems primordial in theme and execution, an infant medium taking halting steps away from the proscenium theatre. Cameras caught actors’ gestures exaggerated to reach the back of the house. Audiences of the time were accustomed to this; today it comes across as mugging. Brooks’ acting, which appears contemporary, was met with derision. It was felt that she was not acting, or that she could not act at all. This attitude changed—too late for her career—with audiences after World War II. What originally appeared artless was eventually seen as a subtle ballet amidst the mannered work of the era.
By the 1920s the star-making (and destroying) machinery of Hollywood was well established and recognizable today. The game was played with rules made by men, or you were cast aside—many were in line to take your place. Brooks, a headstrong misfit refusing to play the pliant artist, hated film sets and spent time between scenes reading the philosopher Schopenhauer. By the metric of box office, she was a nobody. She has since become iconic despite having worked as a lead in only a handful of films. It took a last-minute exit from her studio contract followed by a fortuitous telegram from Germany for her to take the star-making role of Lulu in Berlin.
Brooks glides through the film with the physical assurance of the trained dancer she had been. We first see her coming out to greet the meter man. She smiles and pours him a drink from the bottle under her arm. He is smitten, the first of many in the film. Their interaction is interrupted by a crumply old man. Lulu is thrilled to see him and literally shoves him into her lavish apartment. The meter man’s spell is broken, his moment of erotic possibility abruptly terminated. The old man makes himself at home and helps himself to her wallet. She smiles again and does not mind. It is one of many exchanges in the film where Lulu, or some part of her, is being assessed, counted for currency or possession. What ensues is a melodrama between Lulu and a shifting entourage of admirers. On trial for a murder she did not initiate, the prosecutor is initially stunned to silence by her presence before arguing that she, like Pandora, is to blame for the ills befalling men.
“Pandora’s Box” is now seen as essential world cinema. G.W. Pabst crafted a film whose themes feel contemporary, with elaborate scenes captured by beautiful cinematography and starring an incandescent actor whose stature has, over time, eclipsed even her estimable director’s.
In the opening credits Hugh Hefner’s name appears for contributing to the film’s restoration. How interesting that the late publisher of Playboy would find this worth supporting, for him to associate, however distant, with Brooks. The ensuing drip of sleazy revelations about him, followed by Me Too, and now the Epstein saga, revealed the ongoing trafficking of young women by older, powerful men who sought to ignore or blame their victims than face an accounting—themes explored almost a century ago by the men circling the powerful gravitational force of Louise Brooks’ Lulu in “Pandora’s Box.”
Pandora’s Box is available to stream on YouTube, The Criterion Collection, and available on DVD.
Mario Cardenas has worked in motion pictures for over 30 years and strives to keep his sense of humor.