In the 1929 film Pandora’s Box, Lulu is based on characters from whose plays?

In the 1929 film Pandora’s Box, Lulu is based on characters from Frank Wedekind’s plays.

Director Georg Wilhelm Pabst drew chiefly on Wedekind’s dramas Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box. Both plays feature Lulu, a captivating figure whose relationships and choices produce increasingly disastrous consequences. The film combines material from the two works rather than adapting the ancient Greek Pandora story.

Wedekind was a German playwright whose work often challenged conventional ideas about sexuality, respectability, and social control. His Lulu plays were controversial when staged and later became important sources for opera, theatre, and film.

Alban Berg adapted the Lulu plays into the opera Lulu, which premiered after Berg’s death in 1937. This creates a common point of confusion: the film, the plays, and the opera all concern Lulu, but they are separate adaptations. The Greek myth supplies the title’s symbolism, not the film’s plot or characters.