Pandora’s Box is the 1929 German silent film directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst that shares its title with Pandora’s myth. The film stars Louise Brooks as Lulu, a charismatic woman whose relationships and choices drive the tragic story. It is adapted from Frank Wedekind’s plays Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box rather than being a direct dramatization of Hesiod’s Greek myth.
The title invokes the mythic idea of an apparently attractive source of destructive consequences. The film’s Lulu is not the mythological Pandora, and its plot does not reproduce the ancient story about Zeus, Prometheus, Epimetheus, and the jar.
Pabst’s film became especially famous after later critical reassessment of Brooks’s performance. It is now regarded as a major work of German silent cinema and Weimar-era filmmaking. The title can therefore refer either to the ancient myth’s modern idiom or to this distinct 1929 film, depending on context.