The 1929 film Pandora’s Box adapts Lulu plays by which German playwright?

The 1929 film Pandora’s Box adapts Lulu plays by the German playwright Frank Wedekind. Its story draws mainly on Wedekind’s dramas Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box, which together form the Lulu cycle.

Wedekind created Lulu as a controversial figure whose relationships expose the desires and double standards of the society around her. The plays were written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and were notorious for their frank treatment of sexuality and morality.

Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s film does not simply reproduce the stage dramas. It reshapes the material for silent cinema, using visual performance, editing, and Louise Brooks’s screen presence to tell Lulu’s story without synchronized spoken dialogue.

The title can cause confusion with the ancient Greek myth. Wedekind borrowed the Pandora association for his drama, but the film’s plot is a modern literary tragedy about Lulu, not Hesiod’s account of the first woman and the released evils.