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Pandora's Box (1929)

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Louise Brooks on a Godfrey Phillips Tobacco CardThe Criterion Collection, Special Edition Double-Disc Set.  133 minutes, Black and White, Silent with German Intertitles with Optional English Subtitles.  Louise Brooks, Fritz Kortner, Franz Lederer, Carl Goetz.  Directed by G.W. Pabst.

This page will get a better write-up in the future, I promise, but this just arrived in the mail and I was pretty excited to see it.  So as I start writing I haven't watched Pandora's Box yet, I've seen it a couple of times in the past on VHS, but am really looking forward to sitting down with this one again.

Why am I bothering with this page when I haven't even watched the flick yet, well, I wanted to let you know what exactly you get with this Criterion set.  By the way, retail is $39.99 on this one, I picked it up through Amazon.com for $27.88 -- I ordered it Monday morning the day before it's release and it's in my hands Tuesday afternoon as I write this.

From the back of the case here's what you get.  On disc 1 is the new, restored high-definition transfer of the definitive Munich Film Museum restoration of Pandora's Box.  There are four musical scores, each supposed to offer a different interpretation of the film.  There's audio commentary by film scholars Thomas Elsaesser and Mary Ann Doane.  Finally the film has new and improved English subtitle translation, which I assume refers to the words used rather than the display of them.

Disc 2 is where the fun stuff is.  First is the 60-minute documentary Louise Brooks: Looking for Lulu from 1998 -- I had this one on DVD, but to be honest the audio was terrible so I'm crossing my fingers this plays a little better.  Next, and I'm excited about this one because I haven't seen it before, Lulu in Berlin (1984), a 48-minute interview with Louise Brooks conducted by Richard Leacock and Susan Steinberg Woll.  I'm assuming this is where some of the interview clips came from that I remember being included in Looking for Lulu.  Also there are new video interviews with Leacock as well as Michael Pabst, G.W.'s son.  And there's the stills gallery which I honestly never bother with.

Also included, and this was a total surprise, is a 96-page paperback book "Reflections on Pandora's Box."  Articles inside are "Opening Pandora's Box" by J. Hoberman, "Four Scores", "The Girl in the Black Helmet" by Kenneth Tynan which is an from the June 11, 1979 issue of The New Yorker, and "Pabst and Lulu" by Brooks herself from the Summer 1965 issue of Sight and Sound.  I've read the "Pabst and Lulu" article in Lulu in Hollywood, but I've never had a chance to see the oft referenced Tynan article, which runs over 50 pages in this format, and so I am really looking forward to that.  Flipping through the book it is also loaded with photos.

That's the preview of Pandora's Box, I'll be back with more after I begin to digest everything.
 

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