Pabst Pandora Brooks

Films
Pabst, G.W. Die Bchse der Pandora. (1928) Deutschland
Pabst, G.W. Tagebuch einer Verlorenen. (1929) Deutschland
Pabst, G.W. Die Freudlose Gasse. (1925) Deutschland
Grune, Karl. Die Strae. (1923) Deutschland

Citations/Ideas
BROOKSLULU

Those who have seen her can nerver 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 photognie; she embodies in herself all that cinema rediscovered
in its last years of silence : complete naturalness and complete simplicity. [Langlois]
the poetry of Louise is the poetry of rare loves, of magnetism at high tension...beauty as blinding as
ten galaxial suns...the perfect apparation...more than a myth, she is a magical presence, a real phantom,
the magnetism of the cinema [Ado Kyrou]
Femme Fatale : sexual alluring, but remote woman through whom men experience the irrational,
obsessional and ultimately destructive formce of female sexuality. [Elsaesser]
Lulu : 'destiny as pure-present', image of non-alienated existence. [Elsaesser]
Pandora [ = (everything) + = she who gives everything] : used to invoke chthonic
deities such as Gaia, Hecate.
Pandoras box : from which all evils of the world spread after the lid was opened, only (hope)
remained inside after the lid was closed.
Erdgeist = earth spirit, chthonic; Lulu play by Wedekind.
The pagan White Godess, eternal as the earth [cthonic] but as changeable as the seasons, nurtured no
less assuredly than She destroyed
American girl : apper, jazz.
Is Lulu active or passive? [Elsaesser]
Is Lulu innocent or guilty? [Doane]
a being of provocative externality, animated but without depth, attentive but without memory;
persistent but without will-power or discipline : intellgient but without self-reexivity; intense but
without pathos [Elsaesser]
SPARKLING SURFACE

Weimar : 'cult of surface appearances'

Kammerspiel : a hushed expressionism as well as a micro-realism, discrete, mued, cocoon-like,
intimist [Amengual]
From Kammerspiel [think chamber music] to Lichtspiel [light-play, play of light].
Lulu often equated with images, photographs; framed in doorways; briey posed by the camera.
SheenSparkleGlintOptical aberration.
Ornament : embellished incorporation; non-gural pattern; non-structural.
Think of Lulu as the inntesimal limit both of the cinema image [her sparkles escape the stillness of
each frame] and of the plot-lattice [melodrama, suspense, downfall, doom].
Eg. the high-relief gure haunting suicide-murder of Dr Schn [Dr. Beauty]
MOVEMENT/CUT

Movement overcomes the cut, disguises the cut, another sort of invisible edit; Faster than the eye.