Pandora's Box · reception & legacy
1929 · G.W. Pabst
How Pandora's Box has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
A flop in 1929 — German critics savaged Pabst for casting an American, and censors abroad butchered it — the film was all but forgotten until Henri Langlois and the Cinémathèque française championed it in the 1950s ('There is no Garbo, there is no Dietrich, there is only Louise Brooks!'). It's now a fixture of the silent canon.
What's debated
Fans still argue over whose film it really is — Pabst's, or Louise Brooks's, whose eerily modern, un-actorly presence some say the director merely pointed a camera at.
Its footprint
Louise Brooks's black helmet bob became one of cinema's most imitated images, echoing through everything from Guido Crepax's Valentina comics to Mia Wallace in Pulp Fiction; the film is also a landmark for Countess Geschwitz, widely cited as one of the screen's first openly lesbian characters.
Where it stands
A silent-era essential and a Letterboxd darling — the film people mean when they say 'silent movies can feel completely modern.'