A Choice of Four Musical Scores
The original musical score for Pandora's Box has been lost, but while watching it on the DVD, you can choose from four different ones. Two of these evoke the period in which the film was made. One is an orchestral score intended to be similar to what might have been heard in a big European movie palace in the 1920s. A second is in the style of music played in Berlin cabarets during the Weimar years.
The other two scores reflect changes in musical tastes that occurred in the decades after the film was produced. One of these is a solo piano improvising in an impressionistic style. The other is a symphonic score done in a modern style, so it is less melodic and has more dissonances and abrupt changes in rhythm than the movie-palace score.
Excellent Bonus Materials on Louise Brooks
The DVD contains a one-hour 1998 documentary made for Turner Classic Movies titled "Louise Brooks: Looking for Lulu" that is fascinating. Brooks grew up in Kansas and became a dancer in New York at age 15. She appeared in 27 movies from 1925 to 1938, and the documentary shows clips from several of them. But according to narrator Shirley MacLaine, "No one burned more bridges than Louise Brooks."
Brooks seems to have been a stubborn and capricious person, and her career as an actress ended when she was about 32. She then fell into obscurity for years until rediscovered by cinema enthusiasts in the 1950s. Late in life she wrote a number of essays, a collection of which were published as the 1982 book Lulu in Hollywood.
The DVD also has a 48-minute 1971 interview of Louise Brooks titled "Lulu in Berlin." It was conducted by documentarian Richard Leacock when she was about 65 years old. Brooks comes across as high-spirited, outspoken and independent-minded. The focus of the interview is on working with Pabst, who directed Brooks in what are considered her two best films, Pandora's Box and Diary of a Lost Girl (1929).
Scholarly Audio Commentary
The DVD supplies a feature-length audio commentary by Thomas Elsaesser, Professor of Film Studies at the University of Amsterdam and author of Weimar Cinema and After, and Mary Ann Doane, Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University and author of Femmes Fatales. They cover the movie from many different points of view, and careful attention to what they say will be rewarded with a much deeper appreciation of this problematical film. But I should warn you that they occasionally use phrases like "the temporality of commodification" and "deconstruct the very mechanism of fetishization of the image." However, this is a mere quibble because for the most part, their commentary is extremely informative and accessible.
Booklet With Supplementary Written Materials and Photos
Packaged with the two-disc DVD set is a 96-page booklet that contains wonderful photographs and three worthwhile articles. About half the booklet is taken up with the excellent New Yorker piece Kenneth Tynan wrote on Brooks that was mentioned earlier. The booklet also has a short article titled "Opening Pandora's Box" by J. Hoberman, senior film critic for the Village Voice, that does a good job of putting the movie in context. And the booklet provides an example of Louise Brooks' writing by reprinting "Pabst and Lulu," which originally appeared in Sight & Sound in 1965. In it are many interesting things, including her claim that Pabst once told her, "Your life is exactly like Lulu's, and you will end the same way."
DVD Details
Below I've listed all the details for the Criterion Collection DVD set containing Pandora's Box.
Release Date: November 28, 2006
Number of Discs: 2
Full-Screen (1.33:1), Black-and-White
Feature Film Run Time: 2 Hours 11 Minutes
MPAA Rating: Not Rated
Silent Feature Film With Choice of 4 Musical Scores
German Intertitles
English Subtitles
Audio Commentary by Two Film Scholars
1998 Documentary on Louise Brooks (1 hr.)
1971 Interview With Louise Brooks (48 min.)
Interview of Man Who Conducted 1971 Brooks Interview (5 min.)
Interview of Director G.W. Pabst's Son (34 min.)
Stills Gallery
96-Page Booklet Containing 3 Essays
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