Director G.W. Pabst (1885-1967) a proponent of the New Objectivity movement who eschewed romantic treatment, maintaining the tenet that real life was far too romantic and 'ghostly' and was hellbent on turning the cinematic world on its ear. 1925's The Joyless Street would bring the director to the forefront of German filmmakers. Its sordid and lugubrious images of hunger and exploitation in Vienna's post-war period would strike an already exposed nerve among German audiences even greater than that of the baroque and fantastic works created by contemporary Fritz Lang.
Pabst could however rival with greatest of ease, both Lang and F.W. Murnau when flights of imagination were a necessity. In 1926's Geheimnisse einer Seele (Secrets of a Soul) he related the case of an unfortunate doctor who descends into madness. As the doctor relates his recurring nightmares to his psychiatrist, his dreams mingle with waking life to the degree where the final idyllic scene in the countryside carries a sense of entrapment rather than release. Contemporaries of Sigmund Freud were consulted to facilitate the director's realistic depiction of the art of dream interpretation.
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| Now tell me about your mother. Soul bearing moment in 1926's Secrets of a Soul. |
The prolific Soviet journalist Ilya Ehrenberg who was based in Paris would write his novel The Love of Jeanne Ney as a condemnation of both communist extremism and bourgeois decadence. When Ufa assigned the property to Pabst they insisted on his pruning the more controversial elements but in The Love of Jeanne Ney (1927) Pabst managed to overcome the limitations with a brilliant visual aesthetic. He and cinematographer, the Expressionist master Fritz Arno Wagner used the camera as an additional character - an outside observer watching and creeping through one scene after another conveying Pabst's allegiance to the documentary approach. Jeanne Ney's tempestuous love affair with the young Communist agent Andreas is undermined by the vicious adventurer Khalibiev during the civil war in Crimea. The confusion of the war parallels the turmoil of the lovers themselves.
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| Love conquers all except maybe the guillotine. |
Pabst's strength as a social analyst has been forsaken. Even in an otherwise insignificant film like Abwege (Crisis,1928) he pins down the decadence of the post war era in a microcosmic description of a nightclub to which a bored wealthy woman (Brigitte Helm) repairs in an attempt to sublimate her disenchantment. Indeed the nightclub becomes for Pabst a recurring symbol of man's inability to escape his own narcissistic disillusionment, for example : the cabaret in The Joyless Street and the scenes of revelry in the Louise Brooks vehicle Pandora's Box (1929). In this film Pabst introduced the iridescent beauty of Brooks to European audiences. She played with a fervor, the femme fatale Lulu, previously created by the androgynous Asta Nielsen in 1923's Earth Spirit, scripted by Carl Mayer.
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| Little Lulu opens up Pandora's Box. |
Louise Brooks would stay on in Germany for Pabst's subsequent film Diary of a Lost Girl (1929). With her demure features betrayed by her mocking seductive eyes, Thymiane the daughter of a pharmacist (Josef Rovensky) quickly succumbs to the first lecherous advances made to her. She bears an illegitimate child and is quickly dispatched to a reformatory ruled by a cruel matron and her sinister male acolyte whose ingratiating smiles are as disturbing as any snarl. Here again Pabst successfully combines joie de vivre with acidulous observation as he would also do to triumphant effect in 1931's The Threepenny Opera.