Pandora's Box by Pamela Hutchinson

Author:Pamela Hutchinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: British Film Institute

Pabst films Brooks and Lederer in Act Two. Courtesy of George Eastman Museum

Lulu the trapeze artist arrives at Schön’s house to put on a performance. She is still swinging, as at the end of Act One, but there are no muscles here for her to hang on to, so she grabs hold of a curtain rail. When she lands, she wants to end up in-between again – between Schön and Charlotte, or Alwa and his father. Callously, she toys with Alwa’s feelings (‘maybe you don’t love me’) and demands to be made a spectacle of, requesting the Countess’s outlandish ‘gladiator’ design for her own costume. She flirts with both of them just enough to give them hope, and to make her lover jealous.

Schön’s response is to slam the weight of the establishment against Lulu’s dangerous sexual energy. His engagement, to the daughter of a cabinet minister no less, was just the opening salvo. He will also attempt to contain his mistress’s career using his cultural influence – perhaps he can make her respectable too, and have his cake and eat it. As Charlotte’s formal portrait and Lulu’s ‘gladiator’ sketch are bandied around in place of the women themselves, Schön and Alwa, standing in front of a violent tapestry that swallows up most of one wall in the study, plot to take Lulu out of her variety act and into the younger man’s revue, which the newspaper will guarantee is a hit.

Schön, the monocled traditionalist, is dabbling with dangerous matter: a trend that Brooks’s Lulu personifies. Girlkultur was a mass culture fad in Germany in the 1920s, typified by wild revue-style shows featuring exotic acts and rows of synchronised high-kicking showgirls. The dancing was modern, almost industrially perfect, and anything but Germanic. Influences came from the Anglo-American Tiller Girls, the erotic revues of Paris and the opulent showmanship of Hollywood. Alwa’s revue is pure Girlkultur.

In Weimar Germany, Girlkultur went hand in hand with the ascent of the New Woman: financially and sexually independent. The loss of young men to the First World War meant that women had to go to work, and many of them stayed in their jobs once the men got home. They earned their own money, and they spent it on the things they liked – from their own homes and independence to clothes, makeup and magazines. Some of them joined feminist political parties, others bought into the myth that has brought young women to show business for generations: that a working-class Girl with beauty could achieve fame, riches and an enviable marriage. It’s understandable, against this background, that there was a hostility to Girlkultur and its American cousins among some conservative critics in Germany in the 1920s. The dominance of Hollywood films, and the trickle of talent across the Atlantic, did not help. You can sense this distaste in some of the reviews of Brooks’s performance.

Lulu is no longer a ‘flower girl’ but a model of female liberation and social mobility, and, in Act Two, she makes the most of that power, giving Schön her best flapper sass.

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