"What need is there for romantic treatment? Real life is too romantic, too ghastly."-G. W. Pabst The fame of Pandora's Box may have made G. W. Pabst "the man who accompanied Louise Brooks to Germany" (to paraphrase JFK), but this protean director applied his brand of cynical social observation and cool eroticism to many fascinating films. In the late silent era, Pabst's realism brought with it a frankness that Expressionism had artfully dodged. He was heavily censored, his films mercilessly cut. In this series we celebrate the restoration by the Munich Filmmuseum of four Pabst silents-The Joyless Street, Crisis, The Love of Jeanne Ney, and Secrets of a Soul-a project led by Enno Patalas (recipient of this year's Mel Novikoff Award at the San Francisco Film Festival) and Jan-Christopher Horak. To these we have added rare Pabst sound films from other archival collections. (We await the restored prints of his Louise Brooks classics, Pandora's Box and The Diary of a Lost Girl, due to premiere at film festivals later this year.)A cultivated intellectual, the Austrian-born Pabst was a chronicler of the politics and psyche 6of the post-World War I period: "He has what few have, a consciousness of Europe," Bryher wrote in Close Up in 1927. His melodramas provide deeply observed female characters-portrayed by Garbo, Asta Nielsen, Brigitte Helm-and men "pursued by forces (political, social, psychological) they neither understand nor control" (Cinematheque Ontario). The fluidity of his camera is legend, but his experimental bent practically defies auteurism.When Hitler came to power, Pabst worked in the U.S. and France, only to be drawn back to Austria by family concerns and resume making films under the Reich. It was a strange beginning-of-the-end for this director who had explored Communism, Freudianism, and a cinema meant for free-thinking people. We wish to thank the Munich Filmmuseum; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the British Film Institute; Murnau-Stiftung, and Kino International; and for her kind assistance, Susan Oxtoby, Cinematheque Ontario. We also thank Juliane Wanckel and Felecia Stuhldereher, who have translated intertitles for this exhibition. Our notes benefit from research done by Steve Gravestock and Susan Oxtoby for the Cinematheque Ontario program guide.FRIDAY MAY 14, 1999
