The story of the 1929 film Pandora’s Box combines two plays by Frank Wedekind.
The source dramas are Earth Spirit, also known as Erdgeist, and Pandora’s Box, or Die Büchse der Pandora. Both plays center on Lulu, a sexually independent and socially disruptive character whose relationships expose hypocrisy and instability around her.
Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s film does not simply reproduce either play scene by scene. It reshapes material from both works into a cinematic narrative, using editing, performance, and visual composition to move Lulu’s story from Berlin to its final London episodes.
The title can cause confusion because Pandora’s Box is both the name of Wedekind’s second play and the English title of Pabst’s film. The film is therefore connected to two theatrical sources, not just to the ancient Greek myth of Pandora.