Frank Wedekind’s plays Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box inspired which 1929 film?

Frank Wedekind’s plays Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box inspired the 1929 film Pandora’s Box.

The movie, directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst, adapts material from Wedekind’s two Lulu plays. Louise Brooks plays Lulu, a magnetic figure whose relationships expose social hypocrisy and lead to catastrophe. The film compresses and reshapes the stage material for silent cinema rather than reproducing every scene literally.

Wedekind wrote Earth Spirit, also known by its German title Erdgeist, and Pandora’s Box as linked dramas about Lulu. The character became one of the most recognizable femme-fatale figures in European theatre and film. The cinematic version is especially associated with Brooks’s performance and Pabst’s direction.

The film should not be confused with Metropolis or The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, two other major German films from the silent era. Its title references Wedekind’s play and Lulu’s destructive effect, not a direct dramatization of Hesiod’s Greek myth.