A titan of silent cinema, Austrian director GW Pabst left behind a treasure trove of classics. Working in Weimar Germany, Pabst gave Greta Garbo her second ever lead role in The Joyless Street (1925), and propelled Louise Brooks to international stardom with Pandora’s Box (1929) and Diary of a Lost Girl (1929). Attentive to the marginalised elements of society, these early triumphs exemplified the kind of free-spirited film-making that flourished before the rise of the Nazi regime. Faced with this colossal legacy, Angela Christlieb’s probing documentary takes a more winding path through Pabst’s personal archive. Through intimate letters, family albums, and interviews with his descendants, the film foregrounds the man behind the images, while bringing another figure into the spotlight: Gertrude Pabst, the director’s wife of more than 40 years.
Far from a hagiographic portrait, Christlieb’s film reveals Pabst to be a complicated and patriarchal figure. His grandchildren – Marion, Daniel and Ben – describe the great film-maker as a distant figure, who instilled fear rather than love in his two sons. Pabst’s films have been praised for their modern and strong-willed female characters, yet in private he forbade Gertrude from pursuing her own acting aspirations. She also reluctantly underwent numerous abortions – seven in total – so as not to derail her husband’s career.
Christlieb often uses scenes from Pabst’s films to illustrate these family frictions, an approach that feels strained and contrived; these sequences showcase the brilliance of the director’s filmography, but risk drawing a simplistic biographical link between his work and his life, undermining both the richness of his creative visions and the difficulties endured by those in his orbit. Meanwhile the detours into Marion, Daniel and Ben’s careers are interesting, but they distract from Gertrude’s story, which could have merited more screen time. These structural missteps aside, the wealth of archive material is fascinating to behold, revealing a hidden side to a much-discussed film legend.
• Pandora’s Legacy is on True Story from 2 October
