The 1929 film Pandora’s Box adapts stage works by which German playwright?

The 1929 film Pandora’s Box adapts stage works by German playwright Frank Wedekind.

The film draws chiefly on Wedekind’s plays Erdgeist, or Earth Spirit, and Die Büchse der Pandora, or Pandora’s Box. Both works feature Lulu, whose relationships and social position drive the dramatic conflict. Georg Wilhelm Pabst reshaped this material for cinema and cast Louise Brooks in the central role.

Wedekind wrote the Lulu plays in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their frank treatment of sexuality, social hypocrisy, and gendered power made them controversial and influential. The plays also inspired later operatic and cinematic adaptations.

A common mix-up is to identify the film as a direct retelling of Hesiod’s Greek myth. Its title deliberately invokes that myth, but its plot is primarily based on Wedekind’s modern literary character Lulu rather than on Pandora’s ancient story.