Sunday, May 24, 2009
Pabst and Brooks: Redux with a Diary
Pandora's Box, directed by GW Pabst is one of the most revered films of the last years of the silent era, if not all of cinema history, and rightly so. It is a kind of epic exploration of sensual abandon and the shadow side of the human condition. It also features Louise Brooks as Lulu in a role as integral to her screen career as The Passion of Joan of Arc was to Maria Falconetti or as Marie in Au hasard Balthazar is for Anne Wiazemsky. We think of the film, role, and actress being inseparable.
Diary of a Lost Girl was the 1929 follow up by Pabst and Brooks to Pandora's Box. I need to go back and look at Pandora's before I give any kind of specifics and comparison. I can only say that I found this film to be a signficant and moving experience. There are some plot elements that don't make sense on a realistic and logical level, but there is a greater concern here to a high level of emotion and morality that Pabst and Co. are taking on it. It contains some dark and devastating moments, but Thymiane, the protagonist of Lost Girl gets to celebrate a spiritual victory, and the audience does as well.
Thymiane, Margarete Böhme's heroine of Das Tagebuch einer Verlorenen is sexually assaulted and impregnated by her father's apothecary assistant. The baby goes up for adoption and Thymiane is sent to this brutal Dickens like reform school while her father takes up with his latest housekeeper. She escapes and becomes a prostitute in conditions that were certainly an improvement to the school. But it is the last act, in which money and time create circumstances towards redemption that makes this work kind of extraordinary.
This viewing of Diary will send me back to Pandora's Box, but also to move deeper into works by Pabst, Murnau and others like Borzage from the silent era. There is a kind of elemental connection with their subject matter and their audience that the best of silent filmmakers were masters. Technology has changed, but the best work of roughly the first third of cinema's history is filled with moments powerful and as eternal as the best of great literature.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:16 PM
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