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Pandora's Box

Live Piano Accompaniment Composed and Performed by Yakov Gubanov
Screening on Film
Directed by G. W. Pabst.
With Louise Brooks, Fritz Kortner.
Germany, 1928, 35mm, black & white, silent, 110 min.

In Pandora's Box, Louise Brooks provides one of the great performances of the silent era as Lulu, the hedonistic but otherwise innocent prostitute who unwittingly brings down all who come into contact with her. Released at a time when sound films were flooding the market, Pandora's Box had multiple problems with the censors as well: Lulu sleeps with both a father and his son, gambles, lies, and befriends cinema's first sympathetic lesbian. Panned and forgotten in its own time, it was rediscovered in the 1950s when numerous film historians agreed that Pandora's Box was a masterpiece and Brooks, a minor star best known for her black helmet haircut, a major talent.

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