While enjoying a reunion with her first pimp, the disreputable Schigolch, high-class prostitute Lulu is interrupted by her current lover, the widower and newspaper editor Peter Schun, who breaks the news that for respectability's sake he is to marry Marie de Zarniko, a politician's daughter. Lulu is unmoved, even when Schon spots Schigolch hiding outside and leaves in disgust, and responds with delight to Schigolch's suggestion that she join his strongman friend Rodrigo Quast in a variety act. But she p rovocatively visits Schon's house, ostensibly to see his son Alwa (who also loves her), and there meets the lesbian countess Anna Geschwitz, who eagerly agrees to design clothes for her. Angry at Lulu's visit, Schon decides that a part in Alwa's forthcom ing revue would keep her out of mischief. On the first night of the show Lulu throws a tantrum and refuses to perform in the presence of Schon's fiancee; only when Schon has seduced her does she agree to take the stage, and by then Marie, discovering the compromise, has broken the engagement. Schon fatefully undertakes to marry Lulu. At the wedding reception Lulu creates a stir by dancing with Geschwitz, and then retires with Schigolch and Quast to the nuptial bedroom, where Schon discovers them drunke nly embracing and hands Lulu a gun to commit suicide. In a struggle, Lulu shoots Schon.

As she is being sentenced for manslaughter, Schigolch and Quast raise a fire alarm in the courtroom and in the ensuing confusion Lulu makes good an escape. Alwa, still stunned by his father's death, finds her back at their house; she seduces him, and he agrees to smuggle her to Paris with him. On the continental express, however, Lulu is recognised by the Marquis Casti-Piani, who extorts money for his silence from Alwa, and then offers to lead the couple to a discreet hiding place. Three months later f inds them on a boat run as a gambling den in a Southern port; Casti-Piani has tired of Lulu and intends to sell her into white slavery in the Middle East, Alwa has gambled away his entire fortune, and Schigolch has appeared with Quast, who now threatens t o turn Lulu in to the police unless she joins his act. Geschwitz arrives in response to Lulu's urgent summons, gives Alwa the money for a final stake and agrees to dissuade Quast from his threats. Alwa is discovered cheating at the tables and pandemoniu m breaks out. Lulu, Alwa and Schigolch manage to dive overboard and decide to find a boat to England; Geschwitz, meanwhile, is found hysterical after having strangled Quast.

By Christmas in a squalid London garret, Lulu has re-established her old trade. Walking the streets at night, she chances to pick up the psychopath who has been terrorising the city-Jack the Ripper; he almost yields to her tender advances, but then succu mbs to his compulsion and kills her. Outside, Alwa loses himself in the fog.

More than any other German director of the Twenties, even Murnau, Pabst moves easily through a wide variety of styles: low-life melodrama (The Joyless Street), Freudian psychodrama (Secrets of a Soul), adventure (White Hell of Pitz Palu), politico-social realism (Kameradschaft) and exoticism (L'Atlantide).

His work tends on the one hand to extreme stylisation (dense montages with elaborate superimpositions, long and complex tracking shots) and on the other to a kind of spontaneous naturalism (drawing meaning and effect from psychologically rounded performan ces that still appear astonishingly modern). But to each subject he and Ladislaus Vajda, his regular scenarist, bring the same combination of Freud and Marx, an intense, dream-oriented awareness of psychopathology and a tough socialist critique of the cl ass struggle, nationalist politics and the decadence of the ruling class-both informed by a bleak cynicism inherited from the Expressionist war-poets and playwrights.

Thus his films, although often confused or incohesive, are never less than dynamic in their readiness to tackle the issues of the day; never an aesthete pure and simple, Pabst constantly risks failure rather than abandoning his determination to explore.

Pandora's Box, arguably his masterpiece, achieves a miraculous synthesis of all the director's heterogeneous traits. He has extracted a chronicle of the last few months of Lulu's life from Wedekind's plays, and plotted it with more regard for thematic an d psychological continuity than for any more conventional dramatic unity. He has dispensed with the distancing artifice of Wedekind's ring-master and circus setting, which lent the original a charge of barely-suppressed anarchy, preferring to work outwar ds from inside the drama. The gallery of variously pathetic and hopeless characters is presented without Wedekind's overt contempt but with an engaged, unerring truth to their psychological types that avoids sentimentality and gratuitous sympathy alike; Countess Geschwitz, for example, was not only the screen's first unequivocal lesbian, but also pretty well the only film homosexual shown with any degree of understanding for many years following.

The psychological acuity is, of course, a great social leveller, and the film moves from luxury to squalor with only the distinction that psychoses are nearer the surface at the lower end of the scale: Schon has his fatal masochism, Jack the Ripper his fa tal compulsion, and in the film's terms the two are equal. In this light, the drama's apparent steady downward curve is in fact an upswing: Lulu moves from prosperity to utter vulnerability, and the more she sheds her cocoon of security, the closer she a pproaches her true goal. The love scene with Jack the Ripper-and love scene it is, played as sexual climax, using text-book Freudian symbols-is her apotheosis. It follows her one act of giving in the film ("Never mind," she says to her sad, thin client when he tells her that he has no money, "I like you") and represents her final submission to her true nature, climaxing a life of guilelessly provocative sexuality. This pattern of development is the carnal antithesis of, say, Dreyer's reduction of Falco netti to spiritual essence through physical degradation; the spirit has no place in Pabst's atheist vision, in which Schon dies against the meaningless religious ikon hung in his room, and the Salvation Army's presence throughout the London scenes-all dis tant hymns and lanterns in the fog-is gently ineffectual.

Since Lulu remains essentially passive for most of the action, her final acquiescence being the only progression she makes, Pabst extends the Pandora metaphor by making her the literal calm eye of the storm. She generates constant emotional flurries: Sch on walks out and Quast comes in-they pass on the stairs-and the child-like Lulu, thrilled by the presence of her first 'father', Schigolch, takes to Quast's paternal virility as unthinkingly as she took to Schon's paternal devotion. Her lovers, helplessl y enthralled, put themselves through tortures for her: Alwa puts aside the memory of his father, in the very house that Schon raised him in, to help Lulu flee the country; Geschwitz undertakes a heterosexual seduction that duly drives her to madness, as a favour to Lulu.

In the revue theatre, her own petty tantrum jealousy, no more-generates a sprawling chaos of stage managers, stage hands and show girls, who rush to and fro, even up and down, while (away from it all in the props store) Lulu reassures herself that Schon s till cannot resist her. Her tightest corners-in the courtroom and on the gambling ship-are side-stepped by the introduction of major false alarms that throw everyone else into panic, knowingly filmed by Pabst from stable vantage points, to emphasise the a bsurdity of the chaos.

None of these scenes or effects could have been brought off had not Lulu been a convincing focus for them, and it seems that much of the credit for their sustained success must go to Louise Brooks, whom Pabst clearly found the most stimulating of collabor ators. Her 'passive' performance balances between innocence and childishly fleeting-but intense-emotions with candour and precision. Nothing in it is 'actorish'; Pabst found the character in the actress, and drew it out through counterpoint, gesture and inflection. His direction is not in the least manipulative-in the way that von Sternberg's, for instance, is-but rather a matter of channelling. The context that he has formed for the performance is founded on quietly expressionistic settings and rhyth mic cutting, used like resonances from the actress, whose approach to the role is in no way circumscribed by them. Hence the miraculous synthesis, and the most humanely tragic portrait of obsession that the cinema has to boast.