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Louise Brooks’s famous bobbed hairstyle guaranteed her eternal inimitability, its razor-sharp aesthetic a marker of her essence. G.W. Pabst understood this, which is why when Brooks’s doomed flapper from Pandora’s Box flees a courtroom after a murder conviction, she cuts her hair to become almost unidentifiable—to be like other women, except perhaps for the curly-blond gal pal who longs for her affections. (One sign of the film’s coolness is its refusal to waltz Alice Roberts into the celluloid closet.) It’s an act of desperate self-preservation in a film wickedly chockablock with exciting displays of amorous exaltation and domination.

This 1929 German silent drama is a stirring vision of the world gripped by a sinister moral vice—a nosedive into a carnal abyss of despair lined with visionary chiaroscuro sights and thorny mythological reference. With a voracious Lulu at the gilded controls, the vibrantly in-the-moment Pandora’s Box...

Die Liebe Der Jeanne Ney / The Love Of Jeanne Ney (1927) Direction: G. W. Pabst Cast: Edith Jehanne, Uno Henning, Fritz Rasp, Brigitte Helm, Adolf Edgar Licho, Eugen Hensen, Sig Arno, Vladimir Sokoloff Screenplay: Ladislaus Vajda, Rudolf Leonhardt; from a novel by Ilja Ehrenburg Uno Henning, Edith Jehanne, The Love of Jeanne Ney G. W. Pabst's Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney / The Love of Jeanne Ney is a real mystery. And I mean that in the truest sense of the word. The entire film is a puzzle. The opening title card introduces the story: "After the Russian Revolution, civil war rages in the Crimea, bringing in its wake chaos and misery and unscrupulous men." After that, you're on your own.  The first character introduced is simply named Mr. Khalibiev (Fritz Rasp), the first of many "unscrupulous men" who inhabit this complex tale. A more unctuous, repellent individual could not be [...]...