It’s hard to say quite how much one of the great, late
masterpieces of the silent era, G.W. Pabst’s extraordinary,
erotic and tragic adaptation/conflation of two Wedekind plays,
Pandora’s Box, owes to the electrifying, photogenic and iconic
presence of the Kansas-born actress Louise Brooks.
It’s an Expressionist-Realist walk with love and death,
as the sensual and erotic charge of a Berlin prostitute and
Kurfürstendamm revue artist sets herself and all who come
in contact with her into a destructive social, emotional and
physical spiral, ending with her swooning embrace of Thanatos
in the person of a mythical, murderous Jack the Ripper. But
it may not have seemed quite so modern, vital and powerful,
had Pabst chosen, say, Dietrich, or any of the rumoured 2,000
others who the German director screen-tested for the role of
the arch femme-fatale, Lulu.
In the words of German critic Lotte Eisner, Wedekind’s Lulu
was endowed with an ‘animal beauty, but lacking all moral sense,
and doing evil unconsciously’. Brooks had the animal beauty
alright – and a modicum of self-destructiveness, as her
biographical writings testify – but it is her qualities of intelligence
and sheer vitality as Lulu, not her putative ‘reflective passivity’,
that ensures that her performance seems as exciting and fresh,
as well as disturbingly enigmatic, transgressive and deeply moving,
today as it did in 1928.
That does not diminish, however, the importance of Pabst’s
artistry: his psychological insights, atmospheric use of chiaroscuro
lighting and thrilling mise-en-scène, not to mention his taboobreaking
audacity in flaunting this ‘corn-fed Hollywood flapper’
and exposing the dark appetites and hypocrisies found in the dank,
pansexually decadent salons of Weimar Berlin. All offer a perfect
context in which Lulu can dazzle and entice, if not – to borrow the
line Nic Ray coined in 1949’s Knock on Any Door’ – ‘to live fast, die
young and leave a good-looking corpse’.
Wally Hammond,
Time Out London
*3EPKANO are a Dublin based, seven piece band/ensemble who specialise
in producing original and innovative soundtracks for films from the silent
movie era. The band were formed in early 2004 by Matthew Nolan and
Cameron Doyle. The line-up includes 2 electric guitars, bass guitar, keyboards/
organ, drums/percussion, cello and viola – the music is minimalist,
guitar based, and almost entirely instrumental.
