Pandora's Legacy review: the patriarch behind the silent-era classics

Angela Christlieb's documentary Pandora's Legacy examines Austrian director GW Pabst through intimate letters, family albums, and interviews with his descendants — and the portrait that emerges is far from flattering.

Pabst was a titan of silent cinema. Working in Weimar Germany, he 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 films exemplified the free-spirited film-making that flourished in Germany before the rise of the Nazi regime.

Faced with this colossal legacy, Christlieb takes a winding path through Pabst's personal archive. The film foregrounds the man behind the images, and it brings another figure into the spotlight: Gertrude Pabst, the director's wife of more than 40 years.

Far from a hagiographic portrait, the documentary reveals Pabst as a complicated and patriarchal figure. His grandchildren — Marion, Daniel and Ben — describe the great film-maker as a distant man who instilled fear rather than love in his two sons.

The contradiction between the films and the private man is stark. Critics have long praised Pabst's films for their modern, strong-willed female characters. In private, he forbade Gertrude from pursuing her own acting aspirations.

Gertrude also reluctantly underwent numerous abortions — seven in total — so as not to derail her husband's career.

The contrast gives the documentary its bite. Pabst's screen images of independent women, embodied by stars like Garbo and Brooks, coexisted with a domestic life in which his own wife's ambitions were suppressed and her body bore the cost of his career.

Christlieb's use of the family archive deepens the reversal. Rather than another rehearsal of Pabst's canonical standing, Pandora's Legacy repositions Gertrude at the centre of the story, using the director's own papers and the testimony of Marion, Daniel and Ben to test the legacy against the life.

For audiences who know Pabst through Pandora's Box and Diary of a Lost Girl, the film offers a complicating counterweight: the director who made some of cinema's most celebrated heroines kept the women closest to him in submission. That tension between art and biography is what makes Christlieb's film a probing watch rather than a routine tribute.