The 1929 film Pandora’s Box is based mainly on plays by which German dramatist?

The 1929 film Pandora’s Box is based mainly on plays by the German dramatist Frank Wedekind. Its story draws especially on Wedekind’s plays Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box, which center on the character Lulu.

Wedekind wrote the Lulu dramas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They were controversial because they confronted sexuality, social hypocrisy, and the unequal treatment of women with unusual directness for their period.

Director Georg Wilhelm Pabst adapted the material into a silent film starring Louise Brooks. The movie changes and condenses parts of the stage dramas, but it retains Lulu as the force around whom the plot and its destructive relationships revolve.

The film’s title can suggest a connection to Hesiod, but the relationship is indirect. Wedekind’s Pandora’s Box is a modern literary drama, not a screen retelling of the ancient Greek account of Pandora’s jar.