Many directors can and have had their careers reduced down to a single image, but Georg Wilhelm Pabst might be the only director whose career is most remembered for a hairstyle. The two films he made with the American star Louise Brooks are a great testament to her bob, a perfectly sculpted black helmet. Many a flapper took it up at the time and many filmmakers took cues from the Pabst films featuring it in the subsequent years. Despite directing films for over 30 years, however, the trail of his influence is near-exclusively concentrated on a period of just under a decade. He handled the transition from late silents to early sound films with ease, but that was perhaps his one successful reinvention as an artist.
Pabst’s directorial career, which ran from 1923 to 1956, is primarily associated with the late silent-era Brooks collaborations. Pandora’s Box (1929) remains one of the most beloved silent films, and the defining film of Germany’s Weimar era. Brooks’s Lulu, at once a femme fatale and a fallen woman, is a great bundle of contradictions in the excesses of her sexual freedom, that first leads to the ruin of others, then her own. Her seductions doom everyone who gets involved with her by leading them into self-destructive excess, but she’s also breaking society’s rules of good taste and eventually faces the consequences for it. Her screen presence has an icy detachment to it, but that doesn’t mean she’s un-invested; her face’s expressiveness is enhanced by the curtain that is that chilly bob. Pabst was interested in creating a world to surround her, and the scenes of celebration at stage shows, weddings, and New Years make it perfectly clear that Lulu wasn’t the only person having too much destructive fun.
The other Brooks-Pabst collaboration, Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), ends on a happier note despite staging a tougher plot. Lulu essentially partied herself to death, but in Diary of a Lost Girl Brooks’s Thymian faces nothing but adversity and triumphs over it. She is initially raped and impregnated, then contends with a prison-like reform school, and is forced into prostitution, but her kind heart allows her to not only prevail in the end, but also help others escape their own misfortunes. It’s a tough sit, but Pabst skillfully navigates what could have been miserabilism. The prison sequences, with girls eating soup in unison and a towering giant as one of the wardens, are the sort of bigger-than-life touches that made Pabst a guiding star for directors with a theatrical bent, such as Jean Renoir and Josef von Sternberg.
Why Pabst doesn’t have the same reputation as those two is largely a testament to the 20 years of mediocrity that followed once he began working outside of Germany circa 1934. His perception as a Nazi collaborator once he was forced to return didn’t help his reputation in subsequent years, with Brooks noting in an interview with the film historian Richard Griffith that Pabst would argue one point-of-view with total sincerity, then take up the opposing one as if there was no contradiction.
BAMPFA’s 11-film Pabst retrospective is entitled “Selected Films, 1925-1938,” but almost every title is from his golden run: ten titles from 1925-32, and then an outlier, The Shanghai Drama (1938), made in France shortly before he was forced to return to working in Germany by the Nazis. If Pabst’s collaborations with Brooks were a major influence on the subsequent style of Josef von Sternberg’s with Marlene Dietrich, he’d return the favor with this rather pulpy piece of exotica. It’s one of his more credible efforts from his days of going through the motions, but if one skips a title, it should probably be this. Why Pabst declined into being nothing more than a hired hand is hard to give a definitive answer to. It is possible his last few good films, having to be made repeatedly in different languages, was what burned him out. He also began working abroad in 1934 and this could have knocked him off balance. The needs of the silent era and early sound era helped him develop more creative solutions to movie-making, but then he stuck to convention. The final note on latter-day Pabst came from the memoirs of Leni Riefenstahl, who’d been made a star by Pabst’s work as a co-director on the mountaineering film The White Hell of Pitz Palu (1929). She tried to get him to co-direct on the 1941 production of her film Tiefland, but quickly realized he’d become a totally perfunctory director. She made no efforts to bring him back when Goebbels called him away.
Rather than linger on his unhappy days, there’s thankfully plenty of innovation and greatness to be found in the rest of the Pabst titles from his strongest period. Among his silent films, Secrets of a Soul (1926) is more of an oddball curio than a fully successful film, but seeing then-new Freudian theories of psychoanalysis mix with German Expressionism makes it a singular piece of film history. The other silent films are nearly as enjoyable as the Brooks collaborations, featuring notable star turns from Greta Garbo, Brigitte Helm, and Asta Nielsen. The Joyless Street (1925) is 150 minutes and lives up to its title, but it’s the rare silent film that could be called novelistic because of how the characters weave in-and-out of each other's lives—the street’s design is a sight to behold. The Love of Jeanne Ney (1927) opens with a distinctively Pabstian shot with its careening drunkenness and feels like a great melding of what the silent era did best in its suspenseful plotting, combining Eisenstein-influenced edits that cut on movement and Expressionist sets. The Devious Path (1928) isn’t as well-known, but its whirling nightclub sequences and narrative arc make for an intriguing marriage-focused counterpoint to the single-girl hardships of Pabst’s collaborations with Brooks.
His early sound works demonstrate a healthy versatility in terms of Pabst’s ability to adapt his skills to the needs of the sound era and use the new tool just as creatively as his camera. His adaptation of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera (1931) isn’t much like the musical play at all, and the production companies were sued by the pair as a result: Weill won and Brecht did not. Still, it’s one of his greatest films. There’s not much dancing, but the arrangement of the crowds on the sets can only be called choreography. The fantastical appearance of this tale of urban criminality feels like the blueprint for succeeding stylized noirs. Westfront 1918 (1930) has been noted for its similarity to contemporaneous World War I films such as All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and Wooden Crosses (1932), but it came first and features innovative use of early sound in complex tracking-shots through trenches. Pabst tackled geopolitical issues again with Comradeship (1931), a parable about a mine divided between French and German interests that’s both intensely claustrophobic and shockingly pessimistic. He’d return to excessive fantasy for the labyrinthine pulp of L’Atlantide (1932), a journey into the Sahara Desert that finds a love triangle of sorts turned into oneiric exotica. It’s hard to make claims for Pabst as a serious auteur after a certain point, but when looking at a lineup comprised almost entirely of the work from his prime, it’s perfectly clear why he was the bar to live up to for the subsequent directors who latched onto what he did best.
G. W. Pabst: Selected Films, 1925 - 38 runs December 7 - February 28 at BAMPFA.
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