Pandora's Box

Sunday 21st September 2008 | 1.30pm book tickets

1hr 48.  USA 1929.  Directed by G.W. Pabst.  With Louise Brooks..

G.W. Pabst's film that catapulted Louise Brooks to international acclaim and made her 'the' icon of the Jazz Age tells the tragic story of Lulu, the hedonistic dancer and prostitute.

In Weimar Germany, Lulu is an entrancing and beautiful free-spirited girl who lives on the beneficences of the men who fall under her powerful yet somehow innocent spell. Her current paramour is the highly-respectable Dr. Schön, but even his handsome son Alwa cannot resist the draw which Lulu exerts. Dr. Schön comes to believe he must marry Lulu, even though he has been engaged to a proper young woman of his own class, when his affair with Lulu becomes public. At their marriage celebration, Schön becomes jealously enraged by her behaviour, and tragedy ensues. Although Lulu appears to escape the fate that this tragedy would suggest, her unwitting power over men leads her, and several of the men, in a seemingly inescapable spiral downwards toward destitution and further tragedy.

The Phoenix is the oldest continually operating cinema in the country and is presenting four classic silent films across 2008 with live musical accompaniment.  Live music transforms and enchances the silent picture experience and these screenings will be accompanied by acclaimed pianist Stephen Horne.  Each film will be preceded by an introductory talk by film historian Gerry Turvey.

This screening will be preceded by:

Rain

12mins. Netherlands 1929

A day in the life of a rain-shower. As a city symphony, Joris Ivens filmed Amsterdam and its changing appearence during a rain-shower. A very poetic film with changing moods, following the change from sunny Amsterdam streets to rain drops in the canals and the pooring rain on windows, umbrellas, trams and streets, untill it clears up and the sun breaks through once again. With "The Bridge", Rain became his major breakthrough as an avant-garde film artist.

Final screening:

Sunday 23rd November - Battleship Potemkin