In the 1929 film Pandora’s Box, which playwright wrote the source plays about Lulu?

In the 1929 film Pandora’s Box, Frank Wedekind wrote the source plays about Lulu.

The movie draws on Wedekind’s plays Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box, which together form the dramatic foundation for Lulu’s story. Wedekind was a German playwright whose work often challenged bourgeois morality and examined sexuality, power, performance, and social constraint.

The film is therefore connected to the Pandora tradition by title and theme, but Lulu is not the Pandora of Greek mythology. Pabst and screenwriter Ladislaus Vajda reshaped Wedekind’s material for cinema, while Louise Brooks’s performance became the film’s defining feature.

Wedekind’s plays were controversial because their frank treatment of desire and social hypocrisy conflicted with prevailing conventions. Their influence extended beyond this film: Lulu became an important modern theatrical and cinematic archetype, and Alban Berg later based his opera Lulu on Wedekind’s plays.