ABSTRACT
G.W. Pabst's Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora's Box, 1928-9) has become one of the truly famous films of Weimar cinema, standing - along with The Blue Angel — in some sense paradigmatically for the period's twin identity around modernity and decadence, self-assured glamour and anxious descent into chaos. Yet for several decades after 1945, the film was practically unavailable, except as one of the very special treasures of Henri Langlois's Cinematheque in Paris. The star of the film, Louise Brooks, an actress from Wichita, Kansas was to have one of the most enigmatic careers in film history. 1 After the release of the two films she made with Pabst (the other one being Tagebuch einer Verlorenen (Diary of a Lost One), 1929) she became a Paris cult figure in 1930, but when she returned to Hollywood in the mid-1930s, she virtually ceased appearing in films, and literally became a 'lost one'. Langlois's infatuation with Louise Brooks caused him to feature a huge enlargement of her face — by then scarcely known to anyone — at the entrance to his 1955 exhibition, 'Sixty Years of Cinema':
Those who have seen her can never forget her. She is the modern actress par excellence because, like the statues of antiquity she is outside of time. ... She is the intelligence of the cinematographic process, she is the most perfect incarnation of photogenie; she embodies in herself all that the cinema rediscovered in its last years of silence: complete naturalness and complete simplicity.
(quoted in Card, 1958: 241)