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When
PANDORA’S BOX
Was on PBS
Sorry, but I have not studied this movie simply because I do not speak German.
As far as I know, Pandora’s Box was severely censored and altered from its very first public performance,
and had never been seen in anything even remotely resembling its original intentions until 44 years later.
I could be wrong about that.
As far as I know, it was in the early 1970’s that Jim Card found sufficient missing footage
to piece together something fairly close to the original director’s cut.
His reconstruction was 110 minutes at 24fps, about 20 minutes longer than the censored release editions.
As far as I know, it was Janus Films that premièred Jim’s reconstruction, and that was in 1973.
It seems, though, that Janus also had a print that ran a mere 89 minutes,
and where on earth that came from, heaven only knows.
Unless, of course, everybody was lying to me.
Yes, I would love to study all the release editions from 1929 through 1972, but I have no clue where to find any of them.
Now that I’ve worked out this much of the Metropolis mystery,
it finally occurs to me why the “PBS Movie Theater” edition of Pandora’s Box
was so different from any other version.
Easy.
It was a restoration in progress, and I doubt that exact reconstruction was ever shown publicly at any other time.
Earlier and later reconstructions were issued, but that one on PBS seemed to be an
PBS had worked with
William P.
Perry
in years past, and so hired him to write a score for that film.
Since there was no soundtrack to lock down the speed, PBS told its techies to slow it down to 20fps (each film frame occupying 3 fields),
which is almost exactly right for that particular movie.
It looks just fine at 20fps. No complaints.
Bill composed the most hypnotic, haunting, lovely piano score I have ever heard in my life,
and for decades now I have been humming the “Lulu” theme tune to myself. Calmative.
For eight years, I searched high and low for that particular edition of the movie, but could never find it.
I spoke with the folks at Janus, who insisted that the film was 89 minutes, or 110 minutes, that it was never 132 minutes.
I spoke with the folks at PBS, who insisted that the program was 110 minutes and not a minute longer, period, end of story.
The people on the other end of the phone line insisted, INSISTED, that my memory was at fault.
They were right. My memory was at fault. It was actually 133 minutes.
That version of the movie was broadcast only once, and then the master quads were deposited at Bill’s company,
the Great Amwell Corporation, where they soon began to rot, as quads are wont to do.
In 1985, I was finally able to trace the rights owners, and I spoke at length with a fellow at Great Amwell,
who INSISTED that the containers for the three-reel quad explicitly stated that the program was 110 minutes,
which would hardly make any sense, because 110 minutes would be on two reels, not three.
“But it has Bill Perry’s score?”
“Yes.”
“And it was the tape broadcast on PBS in December 1977?”
“Yes.”
“Then it’s 132 minutes.”
Nope, he said.
We cut a verbal deal:
I would put a $200 check in the mail and they would put a VHS in the mail, and the two would cross.
They got $200 and I got euphoria.
He included a letter with the tape, apologizing for the occasional dropouts,
and responded that, “Yes, it’s 133 minutes.”
Fifteen years later, I loaned that VHS to a friend in Kentucky,
and immediately thereafter she suffered an aneurysm, and so I’ll never see that tape again.
Fortunately, my copy had not been directly from the quad.
The quad was first copied to
By the way, in case you’re curious, the 16mm print of the 110-minute edition, at least sometime around 1985,
had a piano score by Karl Salke.
The VHS edition from Embassy Home Entertainment in 1988 had a piano score by Stuart Oderman.
Neither was a thousandth as good as Bill Perry’s score.
The other scores on video don’t do much for me.
Two of the four scores on the Criterion DVD are passable but nothing more.
The other two, well....
I purchased the Tartan Video VHS, issued in the UK in 1993, 25fps,
just so that I could check out the musical score.
Well, there isn’t one.
It is completely mute, but the liner notes suggest that we put on some Tangerine Dream while watching the movie.
Or The Orb.
Or Bernard Herrmann.
Thanks guys. Very helpful. Not.
And it’s from a dark, dupey, flickery print with gobs of jitter and weave, probably a 16mm bootleg.
Worthy of nothing more than the garbage bin.
I once heard an accompaniment to Pandora’s Box by a trio —
piano, violin, French horn (the program notes say piano, guitar, and trumpet, but that’s not what my memory says) —
playing the same several seconds of agonizingly discordant noise over and over and over and over and over and over again,
for two and a half hours.
The French horn sounded like a whale moaning in agony
as it was being tortured to death by the other two instruments,
which ceaselessly took turns picking through its flesh with a chisel.
They totally killed the movie.
And I wanted to kill the musicians.
Most of the audience politely stood and applauded when the abomination was over,
and that was one of the most offensive spectacles I have ever witnessed.
It would have been better had there been no accompaniment at all.
Had I not been there as part of a group of four who drove me there and back, I would have walked out.
As for the other three in our group, they had never seen the movie before and they absolutely despised it.
Two of them soon fell asleep out of oppressive boredom.
That awful racket killed the film, killed it dead.
That horrid endless-loop wailing transformed a captivating, beautiful movie into an ugly endurance test.
As that repetitious cacophony continued, I wanted to scream out,
“SHUT OFF THAT NOISE ALREADY!!!!! SHUT UP!!!!! STOP IT!!!!!”
That is when I decided never again to attend a silent film unless I am assured that the accompaniment
will be by musicians who have been trained in silent cinema and who know what they’re doing
and who are not using the opportunity to show off.
I am so lucky, so so so so so so lucky, that my introduction to Pandora’s Box was via Bill Perry, not via that trio.
I grieve for all the people who were introduced to the movie through that trio.
By the time high-intensity carbon-arc lamphouses were installed in the deluxe cinemas in 1920–1923,
The above was shown at the
Borderlines Film Festival
on
Sunday, 7 March 2015, 6:15pm, at The Courtyard in Hereford.
As projectionist Simon Nicholls confesses in the note beneath the YouTube video,
he ran it with the Academy 1:1.375 aperture (.600"×.825") rather than the full 1:1.33 silent aperture (.6796"×.90625").
Why?
I’ll tell you why.
Because his owners did not deem it worth the bother to purchase the correct aperture or the appropriate longer lens to accommodate.
That’s why.
To compensate somewhat, he inserted the aperture only part way in order to have a crop that was centered.
Actually, it is amazing that a modern cinema had even the 1:1.375 setup.
That was exceedingly rare, and nearly every cinema on earth would have cropped the image much, much, much more than that.
Look at the booth setup!
A single machine with all six reels spliced together onto a gigantic outboard reel,
and the film had to go through torturous winding paths.
Bad in every way.
Now that film prints are rare, they should all be treated as archival.
Chopping off leaders and tails to splice all the reels onto larger reels should be verboten.
Such assemblies damage the film.
The winding path doesn’t faze projectionists, except for this particular one.
Triacetate and diacetate films are all brittle and getting brittler.
A winding path, as I have personally experienced, can rip a brittle film to shreds.
There is more.
The machine was slowed down to 20fps, or 75'/min.
Pandora’s Box can be slowed down that much, and it looks fine that way,
but it was never shown that way originally and 21fps would be more authentic.
As Simon further confesses:
“Trial and error dictated 20fps was about right for the pianist without too much flicker.”
Yikes!
If you’re gonna slow it down to 20fps, you need to install three-wing shutters or,
better yet, just drop a filter in front of the lens to darken the image slightly.
That eliminates objectionable strobe (it’s strobe, not flicker),
and no matter which method is used the result looks identical, as far as the human eye can discern.
Instead, he just ran it with the normal setup but slowed down, resulting in more strobe, though, he says, not “too much.”
Ach, Mein Gott in Himmel! Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
This is how things are done at a festival?????
Festival presentations are supposed to be flawless.
There should be no compromises whatsoever.
What has the world come to?
Why do I almost never go to movies anymore?
This is why.
Except in the rarest venues, rare venues that are getting rarer by the month, the presentations are all ruined.
I would rather not see a movie at all than see it massacred.
Once again, I am going to be tiresome, even though I have discovered that NOBODY cares a fig about this atrocity:
Nobody cares. Nobody. Nobody.
Except for me.
I am the only one who cares.
And nobody understands why I care.
People get fed up with me for griping about this.
When people ask why I didn’t attend a silent movie I really wanted to see,
I tell them that this is the reason, and they sigh in exasperation and walk away, done with me forever.
“Picky, picky, picky.”
Ah!
Click here for an article
that tells us what sources still survive on this film.
Nothing original survives.
Only three much-later copies have been passed on to us.
That confuses me completely.
Below is what little I have been able to dig up.
Just after I did the bulk of this research,
I discovered that I am not the first person to plough into this.
Thomas Gladysz
beat me to the punch by a full five years,
and then he beat me to the punch again
by a month and a half!
Once I dig up my old VHS, I think I should give him a jingle.
We’d have a lot to talk about.
The scheduled opening day:
The advertised closing day:
Actually, I am quite certain that it did not play at all.
It was scheduled and advertised, but the censor board killed it.
Perhaps the 55th Street Playhouse went dark these two days?
Why was Pandora’s Box censored?
There is not a single objectionable image in it.
There is not a single objectionable word in it.
Vajda and Pabst kept it all as inoffensive as possible.
The problem was with the story and the characters:
a hooker, a pimp,
.png) Image stolen from Wikipedia. 
 Ran two weeks, Saturday, 30 November 1929, through Friday, 13 December 1929. 
Every copy of this movie that I have ever seen misspells Alice Roberte as Alice Roberts.
I see this problem goes back to December 1929! Please pay attention to the German poster above.
This is what you see:
_detail.jpg)
Also, the French poster:
 Image stolen from Wikipedia.
You still disbelieve me, so here’s an autographed photo as listed by Wittenborn Art Books of San Francisco:
And from Cyranos.ch:
So there.
 I had no idea that Alice Roberte was Wedekind’s widow. Wow.  It ran one week, from Sunday, 26 January 1930, through Saturday, 1 February 1930.  So the marriage was omitted? That’s a pretty darned crucial plot element. 
The NYC print had been censored, but the print sent to Baltimore was seemingly authentic, probably maybe.
The reviewer writes that in the preview edition, the Countess murdered Quast.
No she did not!!!!
Either he misremembered, misperceived, or misspoke, or he saw a print that had already been altered.
So we can be certain that the distributor had ordered at least two prints.
According to IMDb, the US distributor was
Moviegraphs,
which seems to have been a fly-by-night
that seems to have folded within a few years.
After a private screening, the Maryland censors hacked away at it.
The censors deleted the murder of Quast?????
They deleted the ending?????
Sorta kills the whole point to the story, doesn’t it?
 Ran for one week, Saturday, 10 May 1930, through Friday, 16 May 1930. 
Thomas Gladysz includes the above ad in his essay, but I have searched high and low for it and can find it nowhere,
not in ProQuest, not in Newspapers.com, not in NewspaperArchive.com, not in GenealogyBank.com, not in Google Newspapers,
not in Chronicling America, not in Google Books, not in Archive.org.
Maybe on Old Fulton Postcards? Maybe, but the site is temporarily down.
I cannot figure out how he found this, unless, perchance, he did it the
Or was it a preposterous claim?
A critic whose initials were “R.H.” wrote in
“The Week on the Screen: Three Silent Films,” The Guardian, Saturday, 19 April 1930, p. 8:
“I had no idea when I wrote last week of
Pabst’s ‘Lulu,’ that it would be
trade shown so soon. It was rumoured that it
was being synchronized, but it was shown
silent last week under its original title of
‘Pandora’s Box’....”
Okay. Whatever. This R.H. also wrongly supplied Alice’s surname as Roberts.
 The 5th Avenue Theatre advertised only sporadically. The movie played at least three days. 
#30#
Original research and commentary copyright © 2023 by Ranjit Sandhu.
All rights reserved. The remainder of the research and all the images belong to others. If any of these images are yours, please contact me and we’ll make things right. |
