SOURCE: Elsaesser, Thomas. “Lulu and the Meter Man: Louise Brooks, Pabst, and ‘Pandora's Box’.” Screen 24, no. 4 (July 1983): 4-36.

[In the following essay, Elsaesser explores Weimar culture's response to Pandora's Box and to the American actress Louise Brooks starring in the film.]

I

For several decades, G. W. Pabst's film, Die Büchse der Pandora/Pandora's Box (1928-29) was practically unavailable, except as one of the very special treasures of Henri Langlois' Cinemathèque 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. After the release of the two films she made with Pabst (the other one is Tagebuch einer Verlorenen/The Diary of a Lost Girl, 1929) she became a Paris cult figure in 1930, but on returning to Hollywood she virtually ceased appearing in films, and literally became a ‘lost one’. Langlois' infatuation with Louise Brooks made him feature a huge blow-up of her face—by then barely recognised by anyone—at the entrance of his 1955 ‘Sixty Years of Cinema’ exhibition:

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.¹

Among those who could never forget Louise Brooks after Langlois' screenings of her films were Jean-Luc Godard (paying homage to Lulu in Vivre Sa Vie, 1962²), and James Card, curator of Film at the George Eastman House, Rochester. He went in search of Louise Brooks in New York, found her in almost squalid circumstances, and brought her to live in Rochester, on a small Eastman House stipend. While he encouraged her to write and take an interest in her own past, he also tracked down and restored Pandora's Box, so that we now possess the image of Louise Brooks in this film as it had been seen by her first audience.

Pandora's Box was not a commercial success, and in the United States, for instance, only a cut and censored version³ was briefly in circulation, at a time when the new phenomenon of the talkies eclipsed and consigned to oblivion many of the more outstandingly modern films of the last silent period. In Germany, the film was widely shown and discussed, but Pabst was attacked on several fronts. Even his most consistent supporter, Harry M Potamkin, was disappointed and found the film ‘atmosphere without content’⁴. About Louise Brook's performance a Berlin critic wrote: ‘Louise Brooks cannot act. She does not suffer, she does nothing.’⁵

A good deal of criticism tried to prove Pabst's shortcomings as an adaptor of Wedekind's plays, and complained about the film industry's general temerity of turning a literary classic into a silent film with nothing but laconic intertitles.

Lulu is inconceivable without the words that Wedekind makes her speak. These eternally passion-laden, eruptive, indiscriminating, hard, sentimental and unaffected words stand out clearly against her figure. … The film is unable to reproduce the discrepancy between Lulu's outward appearance, and her utterance.⁶

This assessment is contradicted by Siegfried Kracauer, who writes in his book From Caligari to Hitler:

A failure it was, but not for the reason most critics advanced. … The film's weakness resulted not so much from the impossibility of translating (the) dialogue into cinematic terms, as from the abstract nature of the whole Wedekind play. … Pabst blundered in choosing a play that because of its expressive mood belonged to the fantastic postwar era rather than to the realistic stabilising period.⁷

The almost unanimously unfavourable response to the film is interesting in several respects. Even if we can assume special pleading on the part of the literary establishment, busy safeguarding its own territory⁸, the various complaints outline an ideologically and aesthetically coherent position. It goes right to the heart of the film's special interest within Weimar attitudes to sexuality, class and the representation of women in literature and the visual arts. For the passages quoted are indicative of a resistance that, on the one hand, has to do with the difference between literary language and body language (‘utterance’/‘appearance’)—reminiscent of more recent discussions in the area of sexual difference between speaking and being spoken as a subject in language. On the other hand, there is an evident irritation that Louise Brooks is neither active (‘she does nothing’), nor actively passive (‘she does not suffer’) which contrasts unfavourably one kind of body—that of cinematic representation—with another, the expressive body of the theatre performance. Compare this to Langlois' ‘(her) art is so pure that it becomes invisible’: praise that implies a diametrically opposite visual (and literary) aesthetic.

Pabst's choice of an American actress for the part caused consternation among German film-stars. It gives the issue a further dimension if one considers it within the large-scale emigration of German film-makers to Hollywood, the economic difficulties of the German film industry after the 1927 crash and especially UFA and Nero's bid to break into the American market. But ideological attitudes towards America also played their part. Louise Brooks recalls a telling incident:

As we left the theatre (at the opening of an UFA film, at the Gloria Palast, and Pabst) hurried me through a crowd of hostile moviegoers, I heard a girl saying something loud and nasty. In the cab, I began pounding his knee, insisting, ‘What did she say? What did she say?’ Finally, he translated: ‘That is the American girl who is playing our German Lulu’.⁹

Kracauer's comments rather simplify this whole ideological and aesthetic complex, with his implied juxtaposition of Expressionism and the Neue Sachlichkeit (‘New Objectivity’), but as so often, he has recognised a crucial tension in the film—even if, calling Pabst's choice of subject a blunder, he overlooks the extent to which the film actually reinterprets the inner relationship between Expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit, since this ‘American’ Lulu gives Pabst a vantage point on both Expressionism and the Neue Sachlichkeit, as well as on the fundamental shift that the cinema (compared to the theatre) has brought to the representation of sex and class, libidinal and political economy.

II

When one wants to understand the place of the cinema in Weimar society and culture, Kracauer's work is still essential reading, even though it appears different now from the book it was when first published in 1946. Historians of Weimar culture consider the cinema as part of what makes Weimar Weimar, but they are certainly far from giving it the privileged status that Kracauer allows it, that of unlocking the Zeitgeist, the ever-elusive essence of an epoch. John Willett gives an apt summary in The New Sobriety:

There are existing studies that deal with the culture of the Weimar Republic between 1918-1933 much more broadly. ‘When we think of Weimar’, writes Peter Gay in the preface to his Weimar Culture, ‘we think of the Three-penny Opera, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, The Magic Mountain, the Bauhaus, Marlene Dietrich.’ More recently, that other eminent historian Walter Laqueur has defined its Zeitgeist in very similar terms as ‘the Bauhaus, The Magic Mountain, Professor Heidegger and Dr Caligari’.¹⁰

Laqueur, however, had added a proviso:

The fact that Marlene Dietrich has not been forgotten in 1974, while many of her contemporaries have faded from memory, need not necessarily mean that future historians of the cinema will have to share the preferences and prejudices of our time.¹¹

I take this as an invitation to talk about Lulu, rather than Lola Lola.

The cinema is part of the colourful mosaic of the Zeitgeist, providing an easily recognisable iconography, the period flavour, or—again in John Willett's words—important mainly for its ‘atmospheric, essentially nostalgic relevance’¹². Such is the general view, and it implies an idea of cultural diametrically opposed to that of Kracauer, for whom the cinema was not an addition, among the many forms of entertainment that flourished (Laqueur's account of Weimar cinema is the last part of a chapter called ‘Berlin s'amuse’) but its hidden centre. A period thinks, compul-represents and interprets itself—and its contradictions—in all the products of its social life, and among the means of self-representation, the cinema had for Kracauer an absolutely preeminent function. In this respect, Kracauer had already applied the lessons of structural analysis and social anthropology, and as Adorno put it: ‘his way of considering the cinema (as a cipher of social tendencies) has long since become common property, so much so that it is practically an unquestioned assumption underlying any serious reflection on the medium in general.’¹³

No fundamentally new or different history of the Weimar cinema has thus appeared since Kracauer's socio-psychological study of the ‘secret history involving the inner dispositions of the German people’¹⁴. And this despite the fact that in the field of economic film history particularly, and also textual criticism, many new perspectives have been opened up. The general impact has been that in the intervening time, scholars have become more careful in specifying who—that is, what class, what group—represented itself or was addressed, when ‘going to the movies’ became a regular habit. A somewhat different understanding of the nature and origin of German fascism has also made it less urgent to read ‘(the) disclosure of these dispositions through the medium of the German screen’ primarily as a ‘help in the understanding of Hitler's ascent and ascendancy’.¹⁵

Today, Kracauer is the historian of the social and sexual imaginary—the structures of anxiety, desire and denegation—that constituted the identity of the German lower middle class. They made up the bulk of the cinema-goers at the Gloria Palast and all the other high-street movie-palaces in Berlin and other German cities. What his book attempts, in a language that borrows some of its key analytical terms from Freudian and Adlerian psychoanalysis—regression, hysteria, impotence, compulsion, sublimation, instinct—is a metaphoric description of a dominant personality-type, whose characteristics are that he is male, paranoiac and masochistic, with repressed homosexual objects of identification. He experiences class barriers as insurmountable, and upward mobility a desire tantamount to parricide, punishable by social déclassement, a fate that, like the sword of Damocles, hangs over his head in any case. Kracauer offers a number of reasons why this class and its dominant character-type is representative for ‘the German people’ generally, and why it is reasonable to assume this to be the target audience of the films:

In a study published in 1930 (Die Angestellten) I pointed out the pronounced ‘white collar’ pretensions of the bulk of German employees, whose economic and social status in reality bordered on that of the workers, or was even inferior to it. Although these lower middle-class people could no longer hope for bourgeois security, they scorned all doctrines and ideals more in harmony with their plight, maintaining attitudes that had lost any basis in reality.¹⁶

Kracauer's emphasis on personality-structure and psychoanalysis implies a double thesis: firstly, that political and economic life have a shaping effect on the ‘logic’ of psychic development, and secondly, that cinematic fictional narrative is a particularly efficient way of crystallising dispositions into attitudes. The two theses have a separate theoretical status, as recent debates make only too clear.¹⁷ Or, one can interpret the implications as a feminist as done:

From Caligari to Hitler consistently and repetitiously depicts … a national, middle-class, Oedipal/familial failure peculiar to Germany and its cinema. … Beneath its sociological pretense is a perverse discourse on sexuality. … (The) argument places the blame on the domestic family, or historically, patriarchy …, a massive failure of the family to properly inscribe males into the symbolic of paternal order.¹⁸

That definitions of masculinity and male identity were in crisis during the Weimar years is not especially new: Peter Gay more or less built the thesis of his book around the father-son conflicts of Expressionist literature and drama. When Walter Laqueur says the opposite about the cinema (‘one looks in vain, among German films, for the father-son conflict so prominent on the stage’) he indicates either a very literal understanding of the motif, or that he has not looked very far, even in Kracauer. Current studies about ‘male fantasies’ in the literary and semi-literary products of the time, have continued to explore the manifestations of male paranoia and repressed homosexuality.¹⁹

But what Kracauer also argues is that the depictions of Oedipal conflicts and their modes of narrative resolution in the films are so paranoid and perverse because they are a ‘screen’, a field of projection and a compensation for objectively insoluble political contradictions and immovable class barriers. Sexuality—always an overdetermined cultural code—becomes the site for the representation of highly ambiguous fears (ambiguous, because libidinally charged) about any social existence outside the bourgeois order, outside the law, outside the hierarchical markers of identity and difference recognised by the middle class. This is not to say that the representation of sexual conflict, or the many family tragedies in the Weimar cinema simply substitute themselves for the ‘real’ tragedy of class conflict and economic ruin. Such a view would imply an almost trivial understanding of the Freudian notion of the unconscious, and a serious confusion of levels. The bourgeois film of the Weimar period does indeed have a narrative structure whose symbolic code remains remarkably constant throughout the '20s: it is Kracauer's achievement to have pointed this out. But it does not follow from this that the class conflicts of the period are structured in strict analogy to the stages of the Oedipal conflict. If the various revolutions on the Left failed, it is not because its militants were held back by castration anxiety. However, it is quite another matter if in the fictional and ideological discourses of the period, sexuality and the family become symbolic sites for the construction of political ideology.

To give a historical example. In 1925 the Austrian newspaper editor and writer, Hugo Bettauer, author of Die Freudlose Gasse (The Street of Sorrow, adapted by GW Pabst, and filmed the same year) was assassinated in Vienna. He had been the popular editor of Bettauers Wochenschrift, a journal of progressive social views advocating free love. He was also a Jew. His assassin, a 20-year-old, unemployed, first-generation immigrant from Czechoslovakia, had proven connections with the Austrian Nazi Party and was an avid reader of millenarian political tracts. The trial, which incidentally acquitted him, was entirely preoccupied with the question of whether Bettauer's journal was pornographic and morally corrupting. The young man claimed that it was, and that he had acted spontaneously, out of moral outrage. The jury essentially accepted his plea. What seems interesting in the case is that in a social climate rife with class, ethnic, and party-political conflict and close to civil war, sexuality is the preferred field on which ideological conflict and difference can legitimate itself, to the point of justifying politically and ethnically motivated assassination. Otto Rothstock did not kill in Bettauer the symbolic father, but he did find in sexual outrage a subject position that sufficiently unified the contradictions of his social existence (non-integrated minority, unemployment, ambitions towards gentility) in order for him to act in what seemed to him a politically meaningful way. On his side, Hugo Bettauer, a sex-and-crime formula novelist, found in the sexological articles he published a lucrative market among the semi-literary bourgeoisie for his socially progressive views. For him, too, sexuality implied a political and moral position. The assassin supported his confused political aspirations by modelling himself on particularly rigid conceptions of sexuality and sexual difference. The victim, on the other hand, supported different though perhaps also vague and indeterminate political goals and views with an inverse, open, ‘free’ conception of sexuality and individual identity.

To what extent then, one might want to ask, did the very existence of Freudian psychoanalysis and the many sexological investigations that emerged in its shadow and vicinity give the question of sexuality a different social space? Did they reinforce, or on the contrary, limit the kind of metaphoric haemorrhage that makes the period's ideologies of race, of power and authority, of State and the Law, of the Soul and the Will, seem to us so many versions of the same ‘perverse discourse on sexuality? An intense curiosity focused on Woman is undeniable, but it antedates the Weimar period. Freud's hesitations, and his cautious remarks about the ‘dark continent’ of female sexuality were not always heeded by his followers: definitions of the ‘nature’ of Woman proliferated, precisely because in search of an elusive essence, femininity was so often construed in the negative or oppositional image of a masculinity in crisis. Structurally related to the endless father-son conflicts, where male sexuality appears in its most classically Oedipal fixations, and where women are either terrified bystanders or non-existent, one finds in Weimar culture also the sexually predatory and aggressive woman—phallic mothers, on whom the male subject projects both castration anxieties and masochistic fantasies. But there is a third possibility—and this one seems to me relevant for Pandora's Box—rarely in evidence in either the avant-garde or the ‘serious literature’ of the time and nonetheless perhaps the single most striking characteristic of its popular culture: sexual ambiguity, androgyny, the play with sexual roles and the fascination attached to the realm between male and female—Isherwood's Berlin, if you like, but also Magnus Hirschfeld's research institute. Yet it documents itself most vividly in the cabarets and the variety-shows, the fashion pages or the photography and drawings in quality magazines for a popular audience, like Die Dame. Pabst's Lulu—this is the question—is she the demonic female or a Weimar flapper?

III

The figure of Lulu that Wedekind portrays in Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora²⁰ superficially belongs to the tradition of the femme fatale, the sexually alluring but remote woman, through whom men experience the irrational, obsessional and ultimately destructive force of female sexuality. The social and historical dimension of the figure is too complex to be discussed here, but many of the literary or visual embodiments, especially in the late nineteenth century, project onto the desired woman an aggressiveness and destructiveness whose subjective correlative is guilt and self-punishment: for transgression, for violation, perhaps for desire itself. In Baudelaire, Huysmans, Gustave Moreau this figure is a stylisation and a character often from mythology (Salomé, Judith, the feminised Sphinx) whose location in the Orient and among the spoils of colonial wars or conquests gives a glimpse of a specifically political source of desire and guilt. In Strindberg, Munch or Klimt the figure is more a reminder of the violations of nature and instinctual life by the ascending bourgeois society and its consolidation of the family. With Wedekind, a specific social milieu, marked by class division, comes into view.

More explicitly than anyone else, he locates the question of sexuality within an ideological field. The repression of almost all manifestations of female sexuality entails an intense eroticism suffusing everything that is a-social, primitive, instinctual, according to a topos that sees nature as devouring whenever its nurturing function has been perverted. At the same time, Wedekind saw very precisely the relationship between social productivity and sexual productivity that the bourgeoisie had fought so hard to establish, and which lay at the heart of its ‘sexual repression’: it was the energy that had to be subjected to the labour-process, regulated and accounted for. The bourgeois subject, for whom sexual passion is nothing but the reverse of all the frustrations that make up his social and moral existence, is contrasted with the members of the lumpenproletariat—those outside, unassimilable or scornful when it comes to the bourgeois' dialectic of renunciation and productivity.

By locating a deviant, instinctual and liberating social behaviour among circus people, artistes, petty criminals, and calling it sexual passion, Wedekind builds a fragile bridge with another class that also felt itself outside the bourgeois order, the declining aristocracy against whose notions of libertinage, of productivity and non-production, of waste and display, the codes of the bourgeoisie once developed themselves. A non-repressive sexuality thus becomes the utopia where the lumpen-class and the aristocracy meet in mutual tolerance and indulgence: the cliché situation of so many Viennese operettas and popular literature fantasies, the ones that served film directors from Stroheim to Ophuls.

This kind of identification cannot maintain itself other than as a projection that also invests the ‘other’ with the attributes that the self lacks. The attraction of the bourgeois for the lumpenproletariat, however, arises not from the similarity of position vis-à-vis a common antagonist, but out of an opposition. Wedekind's Lulu is without family ties, without social obligations, without education or culture. Her psychological existence is free of guilt and conscience, her physical existence the very image of beauty, youth and health. Being outside the social order, she belongs to ‘nature’—the only non-social realm that the plays can envisage. Sexuality therefore constructs itself primarily through negative categories, where non-family equals amorality, and the non-social becomes the ‘wild’ on the animal level, or the tropical plant in the vegetal realm. Several layers of self-projection are superimposed, yet it is the sympathy of the aristocrat for the lumpen (one outcast for another) that provides the basis for the glamourisation of these negative, somewhat demonic categories.

To leave it at this, is to suggest a very schematic reading of the plays. Wedekind's Lulu is in a sense not only a more radical critique of bourgeois notions of sexuality, but also of the myth of the femme fatale itself. By critique I do not mean a denunciation or a persuasively argued case for or against. For Wedekind, Lulu is a construct, not a sociological portrait: she represents in all her manipulative deviousness the only constant value, set against the relativity and dissolution of the so-called absolute and transcendental values. This, one suspects, is also because Wedekind endows her with a kind of articulacy and energy that makes her the next-of-kin of another outcast altogether: the artist, traitor to his class—whether aristocratic or bourgeois. She voices not only the artist's disgust with the members of all classes, but with himself, which is why her predatory lust is allowed to vent itself against members of all constituted classes and convictions.²¹ Wedekind's notion of female sexuality is thus even more abstract and conceptual than that of the French decadents. As the guise that the artist gives himself, she is distant and alluring, devouring and irresistible. As a woman, she remains terra incognita. For Wedekind, the conflict between class and productivity, between class and sexuality resolves itself only through the intermediary of art, and of an art that understood its own productivity as a form of elemental, natural expressivity. Lulu is characterised by her expressivity, because she is conceived in response to a societal repressivity.²²

The space where such an expressivity could articulate itself is the theatre. Voice and gesture, thought and body could be unified in the performance and thus represent what one might call an image of non-alienated existence, the enactment of ‘destiny as pure present’,²³ even if Wedekind is careful to relativise the tragic pathos of his figure by such ‘epic’ devices as the prologue, the ringmaster and the animal imagery of the circus, as well as stating in the preface that Geschwitz, not Lulu, is the tragic figure.²⁴

IV

The cinema, however, is still silent. Its expressivity, the way it speaks to the mind and the senses is different, and different affective values attach themselves to gesture, decor or face. With it, the relation of expression to repression changes; conflict and contrast, antinomies and argument are suggested, and perceived by an audience, in forms specific to the cinema.

When Leopold Jessner staged Die Büchse der Pandora in 1911, he had written:

Lulu is honest, because she is woman, only woman, who however, has succumbed to the pleasure of the senses, in an elementary form (Urwüchsigkeit) that cannot but bring disaster to us civilised beings, removed as we are from animal instincts.²⁵

In 1923 he made a film called Loulou, with Asta Nielsen in the title role. Louise Brooks, who saw the film, describes Jessner's conception and Asta Nielsen's performance as follows:

There was no lesbianism in it, no incest. Loulou, the man-eater devoured her sex-victims—Dr Goll, Schwarz, Schoen—and then dropped dead in an acute attack of indigestion.²⁶

To Louise Brooks Loulou is pure camp, because the relationship between theatrical and cinematic body-language is so different; Jessner's conception of cinema is clearly felt to be inadequate, even though his conception of the figure (‘Lulu is honest’) would be completely endorsed by Louise Brooks. The cinema itself, and not least the American cinema, had drastically changed what was to be accepted as ‘honest’ in the visual representation of sexuality and affect. Fritz Rasp, also a favourite actor of Pabst's (Diary of a Lost Girl, Love of Jeanne Ney, Threepenny Opera) recognised this very well:

The first law of film acting has been for me, right from the start, to be very reticent with my gestures. When I came from theatre to the stage, I realised that acting for the living image meant a complete break with the theatre, and that the strongest visual effects are … achieved solely through the complete internalisation of a role, for which one is the right physical type. That is why I prefer working for directors who have … recognised my physical appearance … so that acting in film, although this may seem paradoxical, is for me today not ‘acting’ at all, but—‘being’.²⁷

Another aspect needs to be remembered, one that points to a sociological difference between theatre and cinema, in respect of audiences—that is to say, in respect of the kinds of visual pleasure, curiosity and emotion that might bind an audience to the cinema. Wedekind's plays engage an audience's curiosity on a double level: the interest in the representation and dramatisation of raw sexual desire is coupled with the gratification of a social curiosity that allows glimpses at the private pleasures and vices of the ruling classes. In Berlin of the late '20s, by contrast, as Louise Brooks remarks:

the ruling class publicly flaunted its pleasures as a symbol of wealth and power.²⁸

Not only could the film not expect to shock with revelations, the curiosity and fascination which Pabst's Büchse der Pandora wanted to arouse had to be of a quite different nature. Again, Louise Brooks:

At the Eden Hotel, where I lived in Berlin, the café bar was lined with the higher-priced trollops. The economy girls walked the street outside. On the corner stood the girls in boots, advertising flagellation. Actors' agents pimped for the ladies in luxury apartments in the Bavarian Quarter. Race-track touts at the Hoppegarten arranged orgies for groups of sportsmen. The nightclub Eldorado displayed an enticing line of homosexuals dressed as women. At the Maly, there was a choice of feminine or collar-and-tie lesbians. Collective lust roared unashamed at the theatre. In the revue Chocolate Kiddies, … Josephine Baker appeared naked except for a girdle of bananas. …²⁹

Louise Brooks' description of ‘collective lust’ not only highlights the sexually explicit, but also the sexually ambiguous aspect of Berlin high- and low-life. In this respect, the world of entertainment is clearly also part of what defines sexuality and sexual difference for society as a whole.

But once it is no longer prescribed in biological categories (and roles do not divide strictly along the lines of gender), sexuality becomes itself more than a social product: a symbolic structure that can articulate other values, distinctions and categories. In Pabst's film, for instance, Lulu's sexual attraction is invariably portrayed in the context of sexually ambiguous attributes. Throughout the relationship with Dr Schoen, it is her androgynous body that is emphasised. With Alwa Schoen, an incestuous and homosexual element is always present. At her wedding, Pabst makes her dance most sensuously with the lesbian Countess Geschwitz, and on the gambling boat, she lets herself be seduced by a young sailor, in order to exchange clothes with him. Following on directly from this reversibility of attributes seems to be the principal ambiguity that preoccupied critics of Lulu, both in the plays and the film—whether she is a victim or an agent, whether she has a passive or an active role in the events of which she is the centre. Wedekind himself writes:

Lulu is not a real character, but the personification of primitive sexuality who inspires evil unaware. She plays a purely passive role.³⁰

Yet this conception of Lulu as a catalyst of the obsessions and neuroses, of the restless searching for meaning and value among the men she encounters, is rendered ambiguous precisely because she is a ‘personification’. As such she has a positive presence, because for Wedekind ‘primitive sexuality’ does constitute an expressive potential as well as a creativity that is close to an absolute, the presumed ‘essence’ of woman.³¹ Critics did not always see Lulu as ‘purely passive’. An English reviewer wrote:

Wedekind reacted against German Naturalism and his plays are as full-blown and direct as anything the Elizabethans could produce; indeed, the nearest parallel to his Lulu cycle is The Duchess of Malfi, except that in the former case the woman is the active principle of evil.³²

Agency is a crucial question because in our society moral evaluation of guilt or innocence, evil or virtue attaches itself to intentionality and agency. Given the traditional division of sex and gender in terms of active and passive, Lulu's behaviour would find itself interpreted accordingly, and thus her function as a figure of projection for fantasies of power and control is also at stake.

Pabst, it seems to me, resituates all these questions, firstly by a script that drastically reduces the number of protagonists and simplifies their narrative functions, and secondly, by his choice of actress. The narrative, apart from stressing sexual ambiguity, involves the male protagonists (except Schigolch) in a perpetually brooding, scheming, angry and frustrated state, the very parody of inwardness in search of expression and self-realisation. Against this world, obsessed with intentionality, goals and motives, Lulu appears exacerbating and provocative, ie seductively sexual—because she is a being of externality, animated but without inwardness; attentive, but without memory; persistent, but without willpower or discipline; intelligent but without self-reflexiveness; intense but without pathos. Her superiority resides in the fact that these effects-without-causes are experienced by the men as both fascinating and a threat.

As to the choice of actress, the cameraman Paul Falkenberg reported:

Preparation for Pandora's Box was quite a saga, because Pabst couldn't find a Lulu. He wasn't satisfied with any actress at hand, and for months everybody connected with the production went around looking for a Lulu. I talked to girls on the street, on the subway, in railway stations …³³

Louise Brooks had her own conception of the role. She, too, seems inclined to see Lulu as a victim, although elsewhere she says that at the end, Lulu ‘receive(s) the gift that has been her dream since childhood. Death by a sexual maniac’.³⁴ Here is why she thought the film controversial:

(Besides) daring to show the prostitute as victim, Mr Pabst went on to the final damning immorality of making his Lulu as ‘sweetly innocent’ as the flowers that adorned her costumes and filled the scenes of the play. … How Pabst determined that I was his unaffected Lulu, with the childish simpleness of vice, was part of the mysterious alliance that seemed to exist between us. … When Pandora's Box was released in 1929, film critics objected because Lulu did not suffer after the manner of Sarah Bernhardt in Camille. Publicity photographs before the filming of Pandora's Box show Pabst watching me with scientific intensity. … (He) let me play Lulu naturally … And that was perhaps his most brilliant directorial achievement—getting a group of actors to play unsympathetic characters, whose only motivation was sexual gratification. Fritz Kortner, as Schön, wanted to be the victim. Franz Lederer, as the incestuous son Alva Schön, wanted to be adorable. Carl Goetz wanted to get laughs playing the old pimp Schigolch. Alice Roberts, the Belgian actress who played the screen's first lesbian, the Countess Geschwitz, was prepared to go no further than repression in mannish suits.³⁵

It is quite possible to see the film in the terms that Louise Brooks suggests: Lulu is a child-like creature, and her attraction resides in the incorruptibility, the lack of guile, menace, calculation, the simple pleasures she enjoys, among which are sex, but it could be the bulging biceps of a trapeze artist, the sight of old Schigolch in the doorway, the fashion page in an illustrated journal, or mistletoe at Christmas-time. But Lulu is not one of those obsessional figures of the Victorians—a child bride or Browning's ‘Last Duchess’. Her sexual ambiguity and indeterminacy has nothing to do with puberty. Just as Pabst seems concerned to redefine active and passive, so he is at pains not to take up Wedekind's paradigm of the anti-social as identifiable with animal nature or tropical vegetation (it is Dr Schoen who keeps a particularly wild and luxuriant plant in his office). She is modern, in a manner that at the time would have been labelled ‘American’, even without the choice of a Hollywood actress for the part and the ballyhoo this created. But the film does not make ‘Americanism’ an issue as did Pabst's Joyless Street. On the contrary, it gives us a Lulu practically without origin, or particular cultural associations. No doubt, because it allows for a much more ‘symbolic’ configuration: Pabst's Lulu in her relations with Schoen father and son, as well as on the gambling boat, acts as a stake for male/male power play, and her role is circumscribed by a male double fantasy: she is the woman that father and son both want to possess; she is also the phallic mother whom they want to destroy, the father by demanding that she kill herself, the son by wishing her to act out his own parricidal desire, so that his guilt feelings become her crime. In this respect, the film takes up in elegantly condensed figurations some of the main themes and motifs of Kracauer's (male, paranoiac) German soul. But the very elegance and sophistication of Pabst's narrative and visual solutions indicates that Pandora's Box is not primarily about the secrets of this (German) soul: more a knowing allusion to homosexual latency, and a deconstruction of the pathos of repression/expression. A central complex of German Expressionism is inspected with serene indifference, an indifference to which Lulu gives a (provisionally) female form.

V

Pabst's particular strategy can perhaps be best demonstrated by a look at the opening scene. A man's back is turned to us. He seems to be noting something in a book. It is the meter man, reading the electricity in Lulu's apartment. We first see her, as she comes from the living room into the hall, in order to give the man a small fee and offer him a glass of liqueur. Torn between looking at the bottle and looking at Lulu's revealing dress, the man drops some coins, but before he can pick them up, the bell rings, and grandly, he volunteers to answer the door for her. Outside is a shabby old man, holding his bowler hat with self-deprecating humility. With another grand gesture, the meter man takes a few coins from his waistcoat pocket, to give to the old man and be rid of him. But Lulu, peering past his back, recognises the visitor, rushes out, and flings her arms around the old man; she pulls him into the apartment and past the meter man into the living room, shutting the door. The meter man, not hiding his surprise and disappointment, stoops to gather up the lost coins, goes over to the chair and picks up his peaked cap and battered briefcase. He gives the closed door an indignant look and exits by the front door.

The scene plays on a number of ambiguities. As I hope the description conveys, the meter man (whom the spectator only gradually perceives as such: without his official uniform cap and his back turned, he merely looks the kindly old gentleman) is caught in both a class- and a sex-fantasy, which allows him, even if only for an instant, to place himself in the position of owner of the apartment, and desirable suitor. He becomes Schoen, the master, by the very appearance of someone socially inferior to himself, whom he can patronise by giving him alms. Mirroring himself in the smile of a ravishing young woman he becomes young and handsome himself, and the fact that his attention is further divided between sexual allure and alcohol, allows him the illusory choice between two kinds of transgressions, of which the one he chooses, namely alcohol, may well be the consolation he seeks for the unattainability of the other.

In this brief episode, remarkable for giving us virtually no plot information, the normal social relations implied by master and servant (or mistress and servant), of favours rendered and money received, of alms, fees and gratuities—in short, the conditions of exchange and value—are comically suspended. But it is not only the meter man's illusions that are shattered, when the mistress of the house and the beggarly tramp fall into each other's arms. The spectator, too, plunged in medias res, has no time to get her/his visual bearings, for the scene is staged and edited in a very complex succession of camera-movements, glance-glance shots and glance-object shots, whose function it is to create a very mobile point-of-view structure. It establishes hierarchies and relations between the characters, only then to undo them again. There is, for instance, a very noticeably false continuity-match—Lulu is looking off-screen right, when the logic of the glance-glance cut demands her looking off-screen left—which increases the sense of an imaginary space, not quite destroying but also not quite confirming the realistic space of the hallway and entrance lobby. The two doors, front door and apartment door, suggest a rather theatrical proscenium space, but it is the effect of editing and the dynamic of the point of view shots which establishes the illusion of a real space, while at the same time, undercutting it, making it imaginary. Juxtaposed to this imaginary space, and counteracting the spectator's disorientation (which he shares with the meter man), is the image of Lulu, framed by the door and offering the spectator, too, a radiant smile and the imaginary existence of pleasure and plentitude. The disorientation increases the fascination, the dependence on the image, yet the very excess of the smile (excessive because not registering or responding to the meter man's lowly social status, Schigolch's shabby clothes) breaks the strictly narrative function of her presence within the frame, and makes her a figure of desire in and for the spectator's imaginary.

The scene is a kind of emblem of the film itself: first, in its view of social relations, since Lulu, at the end, when back in the world of Schigolch and past all sense of bourgeois decorum, flings herself into the arms of another outcast, Jack the Ripper, with the same unbounded smile. Secondly, it is also a scene that initiates cinematic identification, by placing the spectator in the fiction, via the meter man, whose lack of plot function turns the episode into a parable of movie watching as a paid-for pleasure. With his exit, the petit-bourgeoisie, Kracauer's Angestellten, exit from the fictional space of the film, and yet, they are the historical audience that the film addresses. They may take pleasure in seeing themselves portrayed on the screen, but—according to Kracauer—they take even more pleasure (and thus open themselves up to the play of pleasure and anxiety) in identifying with their ‘betters’. The meter man waiting in the hall of Lulu's apartment, is in some sense also the officeworker waiting in line at the entrance lobby of the Gloria Palast, for the star to appear or the show to begin. The prologue points out, lightly, how fragile his class-identity is, and the play on the man's uniform and status recalls Murnau's Last Laugh, of which it is in a sense a parody: the presence of Lulu makes it impossible for sexuality to be the repressed signified of the scene, as it is throughout Murnau's film. Lulu's total indifference to class and status renders the predominant anxiety of the early Weimar cinema—déclassement and proletarianisation—a comic rather than a tragic motif. The meter man's humiliation or disappointment derives from the total reversal and reversibility of the social and sexual positions, as Lulu demonstrates.

VI

The opening scene leads me to formulate a cautious hypothesis about sexuality in the film and its power of attraction: sexual desire constitutes itself for Pabst in the hesitation between two roles, between two glances. Lulu's ‘essence’—or that of femininity in the realm of the sexual—is nowhere except in these moments of choice and division, in the reversibility of the order of exchange. Lulu is an object of desire in the imaginary of men and women, old and young; but her symbolic position is never fixed, it criss-crosses both class and gender, both the Law and moral authority.

In fact, Lulu is desirable whenever her appearance is caught in the crossfire of someone else desiring her as well, and her sexual attractiveness constructs itself always in relation to someone experiencing a crisis in their own sexual identity. An example is the encounter between Dr Schoen and his son Alwa, when the father, after having decided to give up Lulu as his mistress, realises that his son is sexually interested in her: suddenly his passion is once more inflamed by anger, hatred and jealousy. But the son, too, experiences desire via someone else. He falls in love with her only after having seen the jealous and passionate glances that Countess Geschwitz casts at Lulu in his studio.

Such a triadic structuration strongly suggests a psychoanalytic reading along the lines sketched above: Lulu's murder by Jack the Ripper merely completes the homosexual fantasy that is centred on Alwa. After the father has died in the son's arms, killed by the mother, on whom the son has projected the guilt for his incestuous desire, Alwa appears to have freed himself from his obsession. But Lulu's escape, thanks to Countess Geschwitz, and the appearance of Casti-Piani on the train, trap Alwa once more in a masochistic, self-punishing role, powerless against the father-figures, and displacing his masochism onto Lulu, with whom he identifies. In the London scenes, the regressive—oral and anal—aspects are heavily underscored: the three live in filth, and their abode is penetrated by wind, rain, fog and cold; the skylight window, pictured as a black hole, is constantly torn open. All three of them are exclusively preoccupied with oral gratification, Alwa greedily devouring the piece of bread that Lulu breaks off for him in disgust, and Schigolch sucking his brandy bottle like a baby. He finally settles down to Guinness and a big Christmas pudding—a return to the beginning, where both he and the meter man preferred oral pleasures to sex. Alwa's infantilism—he is in turn enraged and petulant—represents the sado-masochistic stalemate of his unresolved Oedipal dilemma. Emerging from the fog is Jack the Ripper who is also Alwa's double: for in the encounter between him and Lulu the two sides of Alwa's personality are fully played out—the tender, yielding and seductive side, and the punishing, castrating, destructive side. It is a scene filmed without violence and struggle, hence disturbingly archaic, where the very tenderness indicates a fantasmatic and also regressive quality. As the Ripper leaves and meets Alwa at the front door, a sign of recognition seems to pass between the men that sets Alwa free and allows him, too, to disappear into the fog, having found his sexual salvation from ambivalence.

The film is centred on Alwa in such a reading—problematic in terms of plot, but suggestive of a possible male spectator position. Conversely, a feminist reading might argue that Lulu, after challenging Oedipal and patriarchal logic by placing herself outside it, had succumbed to it the very instant she herself manifests sexual desire, as she clearly does for the Ripper. In this sense, her death inscribes itself in a hysterical reassertion of patriarchy: the woman is sacrificed, so that the order of men can continue, cemented by a perpetually displaced homosexuality and a desexualisation of women as represented by the female Salvation Army that accompanies the entire episode.³⁶ Yet it seems doubtful whether this reading is wholly satisfactory either: however poignant the tenderness, it is without pathos or the element of horror one might associate with such a scene. The tenderness stays, but a cool irony ensures that the end is anticlimactic, a dream that is already faint, and fading, as it occurs, into the darkness that envelops all.

I would prefer to see in the ending another way that Pabst distances himself from the socio-sexual imaginary that Kracauer describes, by showing the events as if he was citing them, and thus holding up for inspection a certain form of patriarchy, or more precisely, a particular vision of sexuality—at once ecstatic and apocalyptic—as it might be said to characterise Wedekind's plays and Expressionism, Kokoschka's Murder Hope of Women, or Brecht's Baal.

For the dynamism of the film, its vivaciousness—and to this extent, its fundamentally different eroticism—comes in large measure from the stark, but always modulated, and often subtly shaded contrast between Lulu's agility, the diaphanous and transparent quality of her body in motion, and the solidity, the heavy black bulk of the men, blocking her way. Lulu's body is in motion even when she stands still, because motion might carry her away at any instant, unmotivated, mercurial and unpredictable. Just as Lulu smiles, and one hesitates to say why, or at whom, and from what inner vision, so her body moves without necessarily inflecting her gestures with intentionality, whereas about the men, every move, every finger and eyebrow is heavy with significance. Of Fritz Kortner, as Dr Schoen, we mainly see his back. His acting style, and Pabst's use of him to fill the frame, stress the bull-necked, looming and cowering nature of his physiognomy. Such a body conveys to perfection (in that it translates into kinetic-gravitational force) the complex interplay of will-power and instinctual drive, of anger and repression, of frustrated, barely-controlled, finally flaring aggression and masochistic, self-tormenting, suicidal despair, which makes Dr Schoen the quintessential contrast of Lulu, and one that becomes paradigmatic for all the men in the film. After Schoen's death, Alwa, Rodrigo, or Count Casti-Piani merely have to affect a scowl, a frown, to bend a shoulder or raise an arm, and one associates the body of Dr Schoen, what he stands for in terms of ruthless plenitude (despite the contradictions) against Lulu's fluidity and lightning changes of place. As the opening scene shows, Fritz Kortner's back is not even the first in the film, among the long line of backs that finally, in the London scenes, spread blackness everywhere.

Countess Geschwitz, in her sexually ambiguous role, is a good example of how what is male and what is female is defined by its physical and gestural support, the always changing contrast between two kinds of bodies, two kinds of body-languages, two ways of filling and traversing the screen. She, Alwa and Schigolch can appear as one or the other, depending on how the dynamics of the visual composition define and redefine their symbolic positions in the narrative. And while it is comparatively easy to describe the kind of masculinity that manifests itself in Dr Schoen, then transmits itself to Alwa and Rodrigo, and finally, in a less unified, more vacillating form, reappears in the Ripper, it is much more difficult to assign to Lulu—and Louise Brooks' acting—a similarly consistent (in both senses of the word) psychological essence. Dr Schoen's back and its doubles are the very image of motive, design, intentionality, the world of cause and effect, of self-realisation as self-imposition, to which correspond self-abandonment and self-pity as their negative mirrors.

Lulu, by contrast, is always in-between: between the meter man and Schigolch, between Schigolch and Dr Schoen, between Rodrigo and Schigolch, between Alwa and Countess Geschwitz, between Alwa and Dr Schoen, between Rodrigo and Alwa, between the stage-manager and Dr Schoen, between the State prosecutor and Countess Geschwitz, between Casti-Piani and Alwa, between Casti-Piani and the Egyptian. … If it was simply a matter of sexual desire, the sexual would indeed emerge as the elemental, irrational, a-social force that it is in Wedekind. Yet almost invariably an economic motif appears to disturb the symmetry. It accompanies the sexual link between the characters, but it also crosses it in the opposite direction. This may be a banal observation if one sees Lulu as a prostitute, who trades sex for money. In actual fact, sex and money stand in a much more complex relation to each other in the film. Certainly, she appears as a kept woman, but it is nonetheless Lulu who gives money—to the meter man and then to Schigolch. Dr Schoen finances Alwa's theatre revue, as a way to stop Lulu getting involved with his son. Schigolch introduces her to Rodrigo, because ‘men like Schoen won't always pay the rent’, but Rodrigo has no sexual interest in her. Countess Geschwitz supports Lulu financially, because she is in love with her, but the favour is not returned. Casti-Piani blackmails Alwa, but he is not interested in Lulu sexually. On the boat, Rodrigo tries to blackmail her, and it is only with a complicated sexual ploy that she can get rid of him. By this time, Alwa is no longer interested in her sexually, yet constantly demands money from her. The police are offering a reward for her arrest, and the Egyptian is quoting a price for her body: Casti-Piani simply calculates which is the better deal. In the London scenes, where Lulu is most explicitly shown as a prostitute, we never see her with clients or in a financial transaction, and she gives herself to Jack the Ripper precisely because he has no money.

Sexual desire is thus part of a more generalised structure of exchange, and in the case of the men, it seems wholly bound up, but not identical with, money and finance. Male desire, in other words, has a precise exchange value, for which either money or sex serve as accepted currency: Lulu is that which allows both desire and money to circulate. The reward offered in the name of the law, for instance, opens up an unbroken chain between police, Alwa, Casti-Piani, the Egyptian slave-trader, Rodrigo and Geschwitz: it is as if the law fixes Lulu's price, and everyone else enters into an exchange, in order to trade most favourably with the same stock.

The scenes on the gambling ship make the relations explicit: while gambling with cards goes on at the tables, Casti-Piani and the slave-trader bargain over Lulu, and a sexual gamble between Rodrigo and Countess Geschwitz is started by Schigolch: all three of them finally decide Lulu's fate, but they do so negatively. It is the sexual role-change that saves her life. What on the level of the plot appears as the suspense logic of melodramatic complication, is in effect an attempt to dramatise ‘the relativity of values’ in a given society. (The gaming tables, and the mad rush for the stakes, when Alwa has been caught cheating, inevitably recall the stock exchange and gambling imagery of Lang's Dr Mabuse the Gambler, 1922). In this instance, however, as in Wedekind's play, this is accomplished without constructing sexuality as an absolute. On the contrary, in Pabst's film a new kind of equivalence, under the sign of interminable exchangeability, is shown to exist between desire, sex and money, an endless chain, which is both the motive force behind the men's anger and frustration, and the reason why they are—despite the different Oedipal/class configurations—mere substitutes for each other.

The London episode is here doubly ironic. It takes us back to the world of the lumpenproletariat, a world outside bourgeois society where the nexus capital-productivity (of which the gaming tables are both parody and apotheosis), sex and money does not apply, and the whole libidinal economy of exchange is meaningless: Jack the Ripper and Lulu are not endowed with the kind of super-sexuality which the Lulu plays project onto the lumpenproletariat. Instead, she is at her most maternal and child-like, and he is clearly impotent. At the same time, they meet at Christmas, amidst the dispensations of the Salvation Army. In other words, Pabst takes them outside all constituted forms of exchange into limit-cases and utopian forms of exchange—those of the gift, of grace and salvation. Directed against both Wedekind's social romanticism, and against the emergent capitalist logic of exchange, as well as criticising the institutionalised otherworldliness of religion, the ending is so anticlimactic because it's built as a series of mutually undercutting ironies.

VII

If the gambling ship is in a sense the fictional metaphor for the economic chaos of the Weimar Republic, demonstrating the mechanics of inflation, de- and revaluation as it inflects and transforms sexual difference, and with it the symbolic position of women within a patriarchal society, Pabst also has in mind another emergent institution that is radically transforming society: the symbolic logic that ties together subjectivity and representation, sexuality and the image. This institution might be called the order of the spectacle, and it appears in Pandora's Box as the critique of theatre in the spirit of the cinema, this time not focused on acting but on mise-en-scène.

At the centre of the first part and as its climax, Pabst has placed a scene in the theatre—in terms of the narrative, it is the point where all the threads so far introduced are tied into the proverbial Gordian knot, which Lulu undoes at a stroke. It is the opening night of Alwa's revue. Lulu suddenly refuses to go on stage, because she has seen Dr Schoen enter, accompanied by his official fiancée, the daughter of the Prime Minister. Despite everyone's protestations and entreaties, Lulu remains adamant. The tension mounts, the stage-manager is frantic. Eventually, Schoen agrees to see Lulu in her dressing-room. But no amount of aggression, verbal or physical, appears to move Lulu to a change of mind. Dr Schoen, eyes blazing with hatred, cannot resist the seductive force of her negativity. Sexually aroused, he embraces her at just the moment when Alwa, frantic, and Schoen's fiancée, worried about his absence, enter the dressing-room. Profound consternation all round, except for the theatre-manager and Lulu, who, triumphant, sweeps past the shocked assembly and leaves the dressing-room in the direction of the stage. The scene ends with a brief exchange between father and son (symmetrical to the one where the two struck the bargain over Lulu's appearance in the revue), to the effect that Schoen will marry Lulu, even though (because?) it will be his ruin.

What gives the scene its force is primarily the editing, as it cross-cuts between the effervescence and mounting chaos on- and back-stage, and the more and more single-minded determination of Lulu to provoke a show-down, once and for all. But determination is perhaps the wrong word, because it makes her seem too active, when in fact it is the strength of her refusal, her negativity, the control she keeps on her absence that makes the events take shape in her favour. Pabst here recasts and reformulates the central ‘moral’ issue of the play: is Lulu active or passive, evil or innocent? The answer that the film gives is that she is neither, that it is a false dichotomy. Instead, it becomes a matter of presence or absence, of spectacle, of image and mise-en-scène: Lulu puts on a show of her own disappearance—and reappearance. The spectacle of her person, about which she controls nothing but the cadence and discontinuity of presence, is what gives rise to desire and fascination. Lotte Eisner, trying to describe the magic of Louise Brooks' acting, after a visit to the set in 1929, circles around the same phenomenon:

And this Louise Brooks, whom I had scarcely heard speak, fascinated me constantly through a curious mixture of passivity and presence which she projected throughout the shooting. … (She) exists with an overwhelming insistence; she makes her way through these two films (ie Pandora's Box and The Diary of a Lost Girl) always enigmatically impassive. (Is she a great artist or only a dazzling creature whose beauty traps the viewer into attributing complexities to her of which she is unaware?)³⁷

What Lotte Eisner does not discuss, is the role of Pabst's editing technique in achieving the effect of enigmatically impassive presence. Film history usually credits him with a particular type of montage or editing-style that makes the transitions from shot especially smooth, dynamic and impercpetible, the so-called ‘cut on movement’:

At the moment of one cut somebody is moving, at the beginning of the adjoining one the movement is continued. The eye is thus so occupied in following these movements that it misses the cuts.³⁸

In observing, say, on an editing table, the way that Pabst breaks down a scene into smaller and smaller units, to reassemble, intercut and build up the fragments into a complex crescendo of frantic motion, one can clearly see the above principle at work in giving the impression of speed, dynamism and simultaneity—the aesthetic juncture between futurism and classic Hollywood narrative cinema. But the more crucial effect in the theatre scene is derived from another logic altogether, that of the point-of-view shot, which is to say, the mise-en-scène of glances and the organisation of the look. It essentially reconstructs the action in terms of seeing and being seen, of who looks at whom, across which intercut piece of business, dramatic fragment or decor space. Lulu disappears from the stage, because, as the intertitle says, she ‘will dance for the whole world, but not in front of that woman’, meaning Schoen's fiancée. But it is for Schoen's fiancée and son that her tantrum in the dressing-room is staged. When they see her and Schoen in each other's arms, the show is over. Not to appear in public means to re-stage a private, Oedipal, sexual drama in a space ambiguously poised between private and public, thus exacerbating the inherently voyeuristic-exhibitionist relationship between audience and performer.

With it, the battle of the sexes, the question of possession, of who belongs to whom and who controls whom, becomes a battle for the right to the look and the image, the positionality of the subject as seeing or seen. Dr Schoen's undoing, in the film's terms, is precisely that he, supreme possessor of the right to look, emphasised by his glittering monocle and his scowling, piercing eyes, becomes himself the object of the gaze: in other words, an image, which in terms of classical narrative is to say, feminised. Such is the logic of the visible that underpins the general position of women in our society, encouraged to objectify their narcissistic self-image as that which regulates their lives: in order to be and to assure themselves of their existence, they seek a gaze in which to mirror themselves. The star, especially the female star—itself a historical phenomenon—develops the implications of this specularity to its limits. Lulu has no gaze, hence the fascination of her smile. It is so open as to appear empty, unfocused, mirror-like. The few times she frowns or looks puzzled, Pabst neutralises her gaze by inserting a cut that disperses, disorients the direction, as in the deliberate mis-match of the opening scene. Some of the difficulties of finding the right actress, as well as Louise Brooks' detailed account of the shooting, confirm the importance that Pabst attached to the look that poses no threat. At one stage he considered Marlene Dietrich for the part, but is reported to have said:

Dietrich was too old and too obvious—one sexy look and the picture would have become a burlesque.³⁹

In the theatre scene, the private Oedipal family spectacle is set within the public, exhibitionist revue. One seems to be the reason for the other, a kind of exchange seems to exist between them. Superficially, the contrast takes up a division already evident in Wedekind: that between the various bourgeois family dramas where Lulu makes her destructive presence felt, and the circus ring, in which she is exhibited among the wild and beautiful animals. But if Pabst similarly places his representation in a double perspective, it is not Wedekind's of family vs circus, social vs animal. Instead, we have two kinds of theatricalisation, two kinds of public spectacle, two kinds of visualisation (which effectively put both family and spectacle outside anthropological or biological associations). One might say that the film contrasts the world on-stage with the world back-stage, and the ironies, the dramatic interest, derive from the comic clash of two related, but dissimilar realms. However, Pabst's concept seems at once more complex and more reductive: the comic divisions between back-stage and on-stage in the film are actually dismembered and reassembled by Pabst into a single, continuous, but at the same time imaginary space—and this space represents the theatre as a machinery, the interaction of separate but interdependent parts.

In the traditional theatre, the area back-stage is that which is hidden from view, the ‘repressed’ part of the performance, so that a representation of the disjuncture between back-stage and on-stage invariably draws its comic and dramatic effects from the disjuncture expression/repression, the hidden and the revealed. This disjuncture, as I have been trying to point out, is precisely what Pabst sees as typical of Wedekind's contradictory and patriarchal conception of sexuality and social class, a conception that the film systematically scrutinises. Against ‘Loulou the man-eater’ he puts Lulu, the bright-eyed American starlet, and sets a modernist-constructivist view of spectacle and visual pleasure against the classical theatre's view of stage, ramp, proscenium, curtain, and the illusion of a self-generated enactment of reality. Less than two years before Pabst made Pandora's Box, the Bauhaus published in its house-journal the text and picture of what a recent exhibition catalogue lists as a ‘kinetic object-box’, Heinz Loew's Mechanical Stage-Model, intended as a manifesto ‘about stage-mechanics in general’:

Guided by a mistaken feeling, today everyone anxiously tries to hide from view on stage any kind of technical process. Which is why for a modern audience (‘den modernen Menschen’) back-stage is often the most interesting spectacle, since we live in the age of technology and the machine.⁴⁰

This seems precisely the spirit in which Pabst conceived the scenes at the revue as a deconstruction of theatre by a constructivist cinema. Unlike the theatre, which represses and displaces the split between the spectacle and that which produces it, between the fantasies that lie behind the realism of its illusion, the cinema—although in one sense the realistic medium par excellence and dedicated to the creation of illusions—is, as the phrase has it, a dream factory. Pabst's Pandora's Box situates itself in this very split between back-stage and on-stage, between repression, displacement and the concealed, by showing the mechanics of repression and concealment, the mechanisms of presence and absence, of the imaginary within realism, and fascination within perception.

In Pabst's theatre, activity is a ceaseless, but syncopated succession of instances caught in motion. Animation and commotion constantly fill the frame, which seems incapable of containing the elements that traverse it. People and objects enter and exit, from left to right, but also vertically: the stage-manager is suddenly hoisted into the flies, part of the set that is being moved about blots out the main protagonist, decorations and pieces of costume disappear off-frame as if through an imagined trap door. The very instability of the composition, and the constant changes of view-point and angle, make it impossible to conceive as real, solid, existent the space extending beyond and outside the frame, as the illusion of realism demands. At the same time, everyone in frame is both actor and spectator, participant and audience. The performers crowd around when Lulu and Dr Schoen have their argument, and from the moment Schoen and his fiancée become visible, they are performers, in their own, but also more and more public drama. The only spectators that are absent, because never shown, are the members of the first-night audience in the theatre. Why does it not appear? Because it would anchor the fictional space in a realist-illusionist dimension, would allow the cinema-spectator to decide and define his/her own specular position unambiguously, by situating the fragments and partial views within an extra-filmic continuity—that of the staged performance and its location in narrative time and space. This position of knowledge the film withholds, and by refusing to provide the sequence with its master-shot, Pabst indicates the extent to which he shared the concerns and outlook of the constructivists. The cinema here defines itself through the theatre against the theatre, and through expressionist psychodrama against its concept of repression and Oedipalisation. Faced with an aesthetic problem not unlike that of Brecht, Pabst did not choose opera or the Japanese Noh plays for his Verfremdungseffekt, but American film-acting—neutral, minimal, pure surface and exteriority—the interface of sexuality and technology as it was present in Louise Brooks, not least thanks to her training as a dancer in the Ziegfeld Follies.

VIII

Lulu is forever image: framed in the doorway or by Rodrigo's biceps, dancing in front of Schigolch or in a Pierrot costume hanging from the wall. In the jealous encounter between Geschwitz and Alwa she is present as the costume sketches that the Countess has drawn, and with an emphatic finger Schoen stabs at the same sketches when he tells Alwa that one does not marry women like Lulu. In court she is on display in the witness-box—the very image that Count Casti-Piani recognises in the newspaper when her face appears from behind the compartment door on the train. Finally, the Egyptian settles on a price after he has shuffled through a pack of photos, which catch the spectator in a significant hesitation about how to read the image: as ‘real’ (within the fiction), when in fact it is ‘merely’ a photo (within the fiction).

The nature and function of the look thus appears to be subject to the same divisions and ambiguities that structure the signifying materials of the fiction: class, gender, body, motion, frame. In strictly cinematic terms, an analysis of the relation of the close-up shots head-on into the camera, and other types of point-of-view shots, or the relation of off-screen space to on-screen space, would probably confirm the systematic use of these markers of difference in order to keep the narrative in the register of hesitation and ambivalence. What interests me here, however, is something else: it is tempting to identify a typically male look, the look of patriarchy, of which Schoen's is evidently the paradigm. It is the look of and through the monocle, a withering look that hits Lulu, Schigolch, Alwa, Geschwitz. We might call it the look of the Father, the Law, and its force is never broken or subdued; after Dr Schoen's death, it is merely passed on—to the State Prosecutor's monocle, to Alwa's scowl and Rodrigo's frown. Of all the sexualised men in the film, only Jack the Ripper's eyes are as unfocused as Lulu's. The film therefore establishes sexuality through the disavowed and hidden power of this look. For the spell to be broken one would have to imagine Lulu return the look in defiance, rather than acknowledge its force by constituting herself as picture and image. One would have to imagine Lulu turning round and sticking out her tongue at Dr Schoen—the way that for instance the heroine of Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou mocks a similarly castrating stare—in order to realise how this would change the film, break the fascination, because it would upset the delicate and invisible balance that has displaced the opposition between active and passive: ‘one sexy look and the picture would have become a burlesque’. The peculiar ambivalence that surrounds the encounter between Jack and Lulu resides not least in the fact that here, both characters transgress the logic of the look specific to their symbolic role in the fiction. This logic gone, the paradigm of fascination on which the narrative was built is broken.

Again, it would seem that only one reading is possible: the moment Lulu, representative of ‘the woman’, manifests desire and appropriates the look defined by the film as ‘male’, she suffers death at the hand of a severely psychotic male, tormented by evident castration anxieties. But the direction of what I have been trying to outline, the systematic difficulty of making units of the represented (in this case, men and women; the one who looks, the one who is being looked at) coincide with the act of representation (briefly, the editing, the point-of-view shot, the framing) suggests that it would be rash to reduce the fiction to a fable where characters act out ideological types or gender-specific positions. Could one not see the ending as a ‘disenchantment’, the breaking of a spell, and seek from there an answer to the question: what is desire, sexuality and fascination in the film?

The distinction I am trying to draw seems particularly important, since it is logical to ask whether there is opposed to the characters' look in the fiction, an inscribed gaze of the spectator, who after all, looks at all the characters and is free to draw his or her conclusion and assume the proper distance. Is the spectator's look identical with the act of representation? Can one juxtapose to the ‘castrating look’ the pleasurable look of the voyeur? In aligning these different types of look, it seems possible to see Lulu as the intermediary, the figure that allows for the commutation and exchange of different specular positions. For her response to the look of the Father is not to return the look with a suitably aggressive gesture, but to constitute herself as image and spectacle for the same or another subject's visual pleasure. An obvious because banal example is on the train, when, in response to Alwa's sullen frown, Lulu, as if by chance, attracts the interested and pleased eye of Count Casti-Piani. Similar reversals structure the entire court-room scene, where Countess Geschwitz, in order to divert attention from Lulu, makes a spectacle (an angry, rather than a pleasing one) of herself, which leads directly into the business of the staged fire-alarm and Lulu's escape.

This division, however, cannot be shown to work throughout. On the contrary, Pabst's use of the point-of-view shot and his editing establish a constant transfer or slippage between the various characters' point of view and that of the camera; since for the spectator characters are stand-ins, markers of position, in the field of signification, whose function it is to split, systematically, and in constantly changing dramatic contexts, the attention of the viewer, Pabst's textual system here introduces subtle but significant variations on the ‘norm’ of classic realism. A brief reminder of the role played by the meter man in the opening scene: the spectator participates in his point of view, ‘moral’ as well as physical. Yet, although he is on the screen for no more than a minute or so, his gaze, his back and his preference for liqueur are all ‘preserved’ for the fiction, as his semantic attributes are split between Schigolch, Schoen and the mobile, hovering, alternating point of view—making hesitation and indeterminacy part of the very definition of spectatorship and its pleasure in this film. Pabst's insistence on Lulu as image, framed picture for the characters in the fiction as well as for the spectator, renders even more ambiguous any distinction between the characters' look and that of the spectator. By far the most disturbing, because virtually unreadable scene—unreadable not in its narrative logic, but in the logic of glance-glance, facial expression, space and gesture—is the death of Dr Schoen. Schoen presses Lulu to kill herself, after he has surprised her in the conjugal bedroom with Alwa's head cradled in her lap. Pabst stages the scene in a series of medium shots, with Lulu and Schoen cut off at the waist. As Schoen tries to force the gun into Lulu's hand, both of them appear in the bedroom mirror. From then on, it is impossible for the spectator to decide whether he sees Schoen or his mirror-image, whether Schoen looks at Lulu, the camera or himself. On their faces, as they struggle, the expressions subtly and continuously change; from surprise, anger, anxiety they modulate until the emotive quality or intentionality of their looks become indecipherable. Finally, a faint column of smoke rises between their faces, Schoen looks pleased, Lulu surprised, but then Schoen's features become rigid, as his body begins to slide out of frame, and blood trickles from his mouth. Lulu's face glazes over, but also shows intent curiosity as the camera pulls back to reveal her holding the smoking gun. As she turns from the mirror, her body is broken up, by a rapid succession of close-ups, before it is virtually smothered by Schoen's slumped body. The scene ends with Alwa re-entering the room, looking fascinated and horrified at his father's dying face.

The very discrepancy between the highly dramatic, but nonetheless coherent narrative situation and the elaborate manner of its staging splits the spectator's perception and points of view in ways that subvert actantial (who does what to whom) and gender identification, in favour of a sliding, reversible, difficult identification of face and gesture. Its effect is to make the scene imaginary, which is to say, it allows us to talk about the scene as a fantasy, be it a primal scene fantasy or Alwa's own wish-fulfilling fantasy. What is important is that such a reading is not a metaphoric interpretation of a diegetically realistic scene. It is a specifically filmic elaboration of the signifying elements which renders the scene imaginary.

One might, however, just as convincingly, construct the scene as ‘narrated’ from Dr Schoen's point of view. In which case, it could represent his struggle, and ultimate failure, to ‘possess’ Lulu, to fix, limit and define her—if necessary by the act of marriage—in order to impose on her the negative identity of his obsessions. Schoen at the wedding is depicted as a man whose life is suddenly and dramatically getting out of control, and in the end only a pistol shot can put an end to the chaos. Since the wedding is in some important aspects a repetition of the chaos at the theatre, the notion suggests itself that the way he put a stop to the first one, namely by the proposal of marriage to Lulu, and the second one, the proposal that Lulu commit suicide, are structurally identical: a caustic comment on the bourgeois institution of marriage.

The problem with this reading, however, is that in the light of my earlier observations, it is impossible to ignore that the filmic narration in the scene is considerably more complex, making it unlikely that the narrative point of view is that of Dr Schoen. What the systematic ambiguity of the point-of-view structure does allow one to do is to speculate on the conditions of cinematic perception and fascination. In the staging of Dr Schoen's death, the act of viewing itself becomes an activity of the imaginary: presented as a series of views of ‘real’ or identifiable objects or part-objects (hands, faces, backs, etc), their sequence is, however, organised in such a way that they constantly imply what we do not see, or evoke a space where we are not. The cinema here is never what is shown: it is always also what the shown implies or demands in the way of the not-shown and not-seen. The many different systems that Pabst develops in this film for splitting perception, in order to create hesitation, indeterminacy or ambiguity are ultimately in the service of producing out of real perceptions imaginary sights. Pabst, one is tempted to say, wanted a mise-en-scène that would make Lulu a phantom, and the hyperreal magic of her sexual presence is the indeterminacy, at all these levels, of her sexual identity. Being an object of desire for everyone in the film, she preserves herself by being nothing and everything, a perpetual oscillation in the dramaturgy of conflict and aggression. The fact that Schoen cannot possess her and dies in the attempt to do so, gives an indication of Pabst's concept of the Lulu figure: to create a presence without an essence, a presence that is heightened to the point of hallucinatory clarity solely by the play of difference and ambiguity. He transforms the cinema into an institution that turns the desire for possession into an obsession with the image, and the obsession with the image into a mirror-maze of divided discontinuous, partial views, whose identification and interpretation always entail a fine and final doubt—for me indicated by the different readings of the symbolic structure I have given, none of which ‘settles’ the issue.

IX

I said earlier that the meter man never returns. I would now like to revise this statement. We see him first studying a book. He turns round and sees Lulu, as the spectator sees her and when he sees her. The meter man is thus the first spectator, turning from writing/reading to looking. In a different guise, he returns as the last spectator. After Jack the Ripper kills Lulu, he steps out of a doorway, glances at Alwa, tightens his raincoat and walks off into the night fog. After a brief hesitation, Alwa, too, begins to walk off, disappearing into the night. They look like men leaving the cinema—not the Gloria Palast, but the sort of cinema that caters for men in raincoats. Both look disappointed, disenchanted, as if the spectacle had finally revealed its emptiness, its nothingness, had proven to be ‘a masquerade that shows that there is nothing there’. Jack the Ripper, as long as he looks into Lulu's eyes, is held by her image, the smile that fascinates with its radiant openness and indeterminacy. It is only when, in the embrace, he looks past Lulu, that the knife appears—the object of his own obsessions, like the ‘knife phobia’ of the protagonist in Pabst's Geheimnisse einer Seele/Secrets of a Soul, 1926. Past the image, past the smile, he encounters once more only himself, only his own anxieties. Jack the Ripper, as a stand-in for the spectator, wanting to grasp the presence that is Lulu, finds that he is distracted/attracted by the flickering candle and the glittering object: oscillating between the source of light and its reflection, his gaze traverses the woman, making her an image, a phantom, a fading sight.

This, once again, suggests a psychoanalytic reading. It suggests that, yes, indeed, the pleasures of spectatorship are of a voyeuristic nature, and that they enact a fetish fixation. And yet, what analysis shows is that the point-of-view structure and the manifold divisions of the film's textual system depend only in some respects on the ambiguities focused on the representation of the woman's body. Sexuality in the cinema, as it emerges from Pabst's film, is not a matter of censorship and innuendo, of frank portrayal and realistic scenes, or any of the other terms one usually finds in public debates about ‘pornography’—nor is it a question of degrading acts committed on women: all these positions, moral and ideological, Pabst seems to have anticipated and significantly restated. Sexuality in the cinema, in Pandora's Box at any rate, is the infinitely deferred moment of, the constantly renewed movement away from, identity—and the film sustains this movement by the creation of a specifically cinematic imaginary that has no equivalence in either literature or the theatre. Pabst called his film not Earth-Spirit, but Pandora's Box: Pandora's Box is the cinema-machine, the machinery of filmic mise-en-scène. The achievement of Pabst's film, in other words, is to have presented sexuality in the cinema as the sexuality of the cinema, and to have merely used as his starting point the crisis in the self-understanding of male and female sexuality that characterised his own period. Yet Pabst is far from implying an ontology of cinema, or to posit an essence of film, any more than he believes in an essence of sexual identity. The very play on ‘Büchse’/‘Box’, on the level of the signifier—can of film, camera, Freudian ‘symbol’ of the female sex—disperses any notion of the fixity of the signified, be it sex or the cinema.

This is why, in some respects, the Louise Brooks of Pandora's Box, can be compared with the Maria of Fritz Lang's Metropolis—the man-created robot-woman. Significantly enough, the figure of Lulu cannot be conceived as a mother, her eroticism is constructed on the paradigmatic opposition to all the traditionally female roles, and yet, while the same is true of the femme fatale, with the latter, it is a sociological and biological paradigm to which she is contrasted, rather than the technological-constructivism that seems to me to underlie Pabst's conception of Lulu. In Pabst's other film with Louise Brooks, Diary of a Lost Girl, the heroine does have a child—illegitimate, and taken away from her—and this fact fundamentally changes the character, making the film more of a melodrama and pathos-laden, the woman becoming the victim and the film a sociological pièce à thèse. With the introduction of the biological function of women, we immediately have sociology and morality, whereas in Lulu, it is precisely the absence of these motifs that makes the erotic shine so brilliantly but also so coldly. Indeed, Lulu's hint of a maternal function for Jack the Ripper is precisely that which makes her fallible and vulnerable. The film thus becomes a parable of the new woman, created by man, whose fatal weakness is her maternal ‘memories’.

The eroticism of Lulu is paradoxically that of the creature that comes to life, the auto-eroticism of the creator and the narcissism of the creature—a relationship only too familiar from the Sternberg-Dietrich myth, which Pabst very nearly anticipated with Louise Brooks three years earlier. This eroticism is one that plays, however, on a concomitant anxiety—that of the creature which emancipates itself from the creator, the sorcerer's apprentice—a motif which, with some justice, might be called the key motif of the German cinema since The Cabinet of Dr Caligari itself, in a tradition where the robot of Metropolis constitutes the decisive transformation, from ‘medium’ or Golem to vamp and woman. It is this genealogy that might give one a clue to the mysteriously truncated subsequent career of Louise Brooks. In her essay on Pabst, she reports that, at the end of her work with him, he took her aside:

‘Your life is exactly like Lulu's’ he said, ‘and you will end the same way.’ At that time, knowing so little of what he meant by ‘Lulu’, I just sat sullenly glaring at him, trying not to listen. Fifteen years later, in Hollywood, with all his predictions closing in on me, I heard his words again—hissing back to me.⁴¹

What Pabst meant by ‘Lulu’ is perhaps precisely this: a woman, an American actress, created by the film industry into a star, becomes an object among objects, alive only in front of the camera. Louise Brooks' struggle with the film industry, as documented in her autobiographical essays, bore out exactly what it meant for an intelligent articulate woman to be a thing among things. It is as if, at the very threshold of becoming a star, Louise Brooks made a film which had as its subject the psychopathology of this very star system, against the background—not of Hollywood, or an ideological critique, but in terms of a very specifically German argument about expressionism, theatre, modernism and cinema. In this respect, the film is indeed the ‘tissue of arguments’ it was disparagingly called by Kracauer, testifying to the degree of ‘abstraction’ that the German cinema, in its commercial output, was capable of. The enigma of Louise Brooks is thus in part the enigma of Hollywood film-making, and the very film that might have made her a star allowed her to see what being a star entailed, in the mirror of a film that dramatised and contrasted the liberating pure externality of the ‘American’ character—the hope of Modernism for most of the '20s—with the contorted inwardness of the German psyche. Against its obsessiveness, but also its moral essentialism, her externality is seen to be not objectivity, and certainly not New Objectivity, but the object-status and objectification of a subjectivity and sexuality—that of women—that still had no name and no place. It was as if in the debate between patriarchy on the one side, and technological modernism on the other, Louise Brooks had glimpsed, albeit at first unconsciously in her defeats with Hollywood but later with full lucidity, the blank that both left for women as a site of representation and being.

X

Pandora's Box, then, is constructed in terms of indecision, hesitation, reversibility, ambivalence and ambiguity. All of these are characteristics of the imaginary, of the unconscious, and in the cinema they define fascination, pleasure and the desire awakened by the image. Out of the homogeneity of photographically reproduced reality, the cinematic process creates its own specific ambiguities, upon which it constructs systems of difference and differentiation that make up the cinema's particular mode of signification, its semiotic status.

The central thematic and fictional support of ambivalence in Pabst's film is sexual desire. Male obsessions—repressed homosexuality, sadomasochism, an urge to possess, capture, limit and fix—confront feminine androgyny and feminine identity in a play of presence and absence, masks and appearances, in a display of spectacle and image as the expression of a freedom from all teleology and essentialism. But, conversely, this androgyny, this ambiguity on the level of sexual definition and identity is only the support, the metaphoric matrix, if you like, that points in the direction of a whole series of other, abstract and conceptual registers of ambiguity—in this case, those that have to do with cultural and ideological stereotypes of active and passive, subject and object, but also with the cogency of Oedipal narratives and the symbolic roles they assign to male and female subjects, on the basis of which the spectators construct their individual subject-positions, structures of identification and visual pleasure.

The source of all these ambiguities, and that which articulates them as differentiation, structure and semiotic system, is the cinema itself, with its infinite capacity of divisions—based as it is on the total divisibility of its materials (the visible world) and the intermittence of its physical material, the individual frames of the celluloid strip, and its optical material, the beam of light. Lulu, the ‘free woman’, living without memory or regret, without guilt or volition, is a pure invention of the cinema. That she seems so modern and so real, is a sign of how much modern reality and the cinema have become interchangeable.

Pabst perceived this perhaps more clearly than most of his contemporaries. His emphasis on the cinema creating its own time—that of the motion of the camera whose signifiers the characters become and to which they lend their gestures, faces and expressivity—and its own space—that of editing and lighting, of the cut on movement or the cut according to the dynamics of the gaze (glance-glance, glance-object)—makes Louise Brooks embody the principle of the cinema itself, in its distinctiveness from literature, the theatre and the other arts. But in this very principle lies an objectification of human beings and a humanisation of technology such as the cinema has developed for itself and—through its institutions—has rendered autonomous, which makes Langlois' praise of Louise Brooks that I quoted at the beginning—‘she is the intelligence of the cinematic process’—so apt and so ambiguous. For this intelligence is the principle of divisibility and division itself, of exchange and substitution, as it can be observed in the symbolic logic of Western culture and society. By contrast, it is a sign of Louise Brooks' intelligence that she decided not to become the objectified commodity which the logic of this process demanded of her. What Pabst could not prevent, in any case, was the momentous shift, whereby the film industry, seizing on the woman's body, and focusing gratification so much on the voyeuristic look, turned the cinema into an obsessional, fetishistic instrument, and thus betrayed in some sense its Modernist promise, by making this modernism instrumental and subservient to the logic of capital and the commodity.

Notes

1. Quoted in James Card, ‘The Intense Isolation of Louise Brooks’, Sight and Sound, Summer 1958, p. 241.

2. Godard's references for this film were Renoir's Nana, Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc and Pabst's Lulu. Pabst himself has been quoted as being inspired by Dreyer's film.

3. According to contemporary sources, all reference to an incestuous relation between Alwa and Lulu, a homosexual relation between father and son, a lesbian relation between Lulu and Countess Geschwitz were removed by appropriate cuts and a change of intertitles.

4. H M Potamkin, ‘Pabst and the Social Film’, Hound and Horn, January-March 1933.

5. Louise Brooks, Lulu in Hollywood, Praeger, New York 1982, p. 95.

6. A Kraszna Krausz, ‘G W Pabst's Lulu’, Close Up, April 1929, p. 27.

7. S Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1947, p 178-9.

8. An inverse judgement can be found in Kenneth Tynan's profile of Louise Brooks: ‘Pandora's Box belongs among the few films that have succeeded in improving on a theatrical chef-d'oeuvre’, in ‘Dream Woman of the Cinema’, Observer Magazine, November 11, 1979, p. 38.

9. Louise Brooks op cit, p. 95.

10. John Willett, The New Sobriety, Thames and Hudson, London 1978 p. 10.

11. Walter Laqueur, Weimar: A Cultural History (I am using the German edition, Ullstein, 1977, p 10, which carries the famous Blue Angel still as its cover).

12. John Willett op cit, p. 10.

13. T W Adorno, ‘Siegfried Kracauer tot’, in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, December 1, 1966, quoted in K Witte (ed), Siegfried Kraucauer Kino, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 1974, p 265.

14. S Kracauer, op cit, p 11.

15. ibid.

16. ibid.

17. See, for instance, Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious, Cornell University Press, Ithaca 1981.

18. Patricia Mellencamp, ‘Oedipus and the Robot’, in Enclitic, vol 5 no 1, p 25.

19. cf Klaus Theweleit, Männerphantasien, Rowohlt Reinbek, 1980.

20. Erdgeist was published in 1895, Die Büchse der Pandora in 1904. For a brief sociological analysis of Wedekind's Lulu, see Frank Galassi, ‘The Lumpen Drama of Frank Wedekind’, in Praxis, Spring 1975, p 84-87.

21. In the play, Alwa Schoen makes the following observation: ‘… the curse on our literature today is that it is much too literary. We know of no other questions and problems than those that crop up among writers and intellectuals. We see no further in our art than the limits of our interests as a class. To find back to great and powerful art, we would have to move much more among people who have never read a book in their lives, and for whom the simplest animal instincts serve as a guide to their actions. I have tried to work along these lines in my play “Earth-Spirit”’, Die Büchse der Pandora, Act I (my translation).

22. ‘When writing the part of Lulu, the main problem was to depict the body of a woman through the words she speaks. With every line of hers I asked myself, does it make her young and beautiful? …’, Wedekind, quoted in Artur Kutscher, Wedekind Leben und Werk, Paul List, Munich 1964, p 128.

23. Georg Lukacs, ‘Thoughts on an Aesthetic for the Cinema’ (1913), translated and reprinted in Framework, no 14, 1981, p 3.

24. According to Kutscher, op cit, p 127, Wedekind told him that he had declared Geschwitz the tragic figure in the preface, because he hoped to deflect the legal objections to his play, raised at three successive trials in Berlin, Leipzig and again Berlin. However, very important is his conception of Geschwitz as ‘non-nature’, ie outside the binary opposition of social/natural and of gender-based sexual difference: ‘What the courts did not object to was that I had made the terrible fate of being outside nature (Unnatürlichkeit) which this human being has to bear, the object of serious drama. … Figures like her belong to the race of Tantalus. … I was driven by the desire to snatch from public ridicule the enormous human tragedy of exceptionally intense and quite fruitless inner struggles …’, Die Büchse der Pandora, Foreword (my translation).

25. L Jessner, Schriften, Hugho Fetting (ed), Berlin (DDR), 1979, p. 213.

26. Louise Brooks, op cit, p 94.

27. Fritz Rasp, ‘Die Sparsamkeit der Geste’, in Film-Kurier, June 1, 1929.

28. ibid.

29. Louise Brooks, op cit, p 97.

30. quoted in ibid, p 94.

31. Artur Kutscher is very good on this point: ‘The inner pivot of Lulu is also determined by Wedekind's attitude to the women's question. … The nineteenth century and its movements of emancipation has “masculinized” Woman, and literature from … Hebbel … to Strindberg gave more and more scope and significance to her struggle. Wedekind is an opponent of this movement, he wants to turn this “culture” back to nature, and tries to emancipate, with a certain one-sided virulence, the female of the species (“das Weib”) from woman (“Frau”), by stressing animal instincts. It is, however, obvious from the whole conception of the character that he passionately endorses, influenced by Nietzsche, the values of suppleness and vitality.’ Kutscher, op cit, p 121.

32. National Film Theatre programme note, no date, no citation or source.

33. quoted in Louise Brooks, op cit, p 95.

34. ibid, p 98.

35. ibid, p 98-99.

36. This reading owes a great deal to a discussion with Mary Ann Doane and a seminar paper she gave at the University of Iowa, in Spring 1979, on Pandora's Box.

37. Lotte Eisner, ‘A Witness Speaks’, quoted in Louise Brooks op cit, p 107.

38. MacPherson, ‘Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney’, Close Up, December 1927, p 26, quoted in S Kracauer, op cit, p 178.

39. quoted in Louise Brooks, op cit, p 96.

40. reproduced in Film als Film, catalogue Kölnischer Kunstverein, 1977, p 88.

41. Louise Brooks, op cit, p. 105-6.