Georg wilhelm pabst biography of christopher

Georg Wilhelm Pabst began his career in theater in Zurich and Germany in , and from to he worked as an actor in New York. Returning to Europe at the outbreak of the First World War, he was interned in Brest, France, for the duration of the conflict.

Georg Wilhelm Pabst (25 August – 29 May ) was an Austrian film director and screenwriter.

After the Armistice, he directed plays in Prague before beginning his film career in Vienna. His first effort as a director was Der Schatz ; The Treasure , shot in a style not unlike the then-popular expressionism. To describe the disastrous postwar social and economic conditions in Austria and Germany, Pabst emphasized the harsh impoverishment of middle-class life, comparing it with the life of the nouveaux riches, speculators, and black marketeers.

The movie is based on the parallel lives and antagonisms of characters who belong to distinct social classes. As in some other contemporary productions, the street became a symbolic scenographic space, a place of encounter as well as separation and discrimination.

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The success of Die Freudlose Gasse brought Pabst international fame. In revolt against the bourgeois order, Pabst approached sexuality with a Freudian perspective in Loulou released in the United States as Pandora's Box , an adaptation of two plays by the German dramatist Frank Wedekind — The American actress Louise Brooks plays a dancer in the title role.

With her pageboy haircut and slender sensuality, she would come to embody feminine subversion and the archetype of the modern, liberated woman. With her intelligence and sexuality, free from conformist values, Loulou seeks to destroy masculine integrity and to defeat the social and moral constraints of the bourgeoisie. In a decadent and corrupt world, her only defense is her sublime and innocent beauty, to be used against men who wish to possess her.

At a time when such behavior was considered scandalous and perverse, the film provoked the critics and received more virulent notices than had the play, and it was censored in parts and mutilated by cuts. Both films exposed the failings of capitalism, which like war has no victim other than the people. An adaptation of a short story written by Ernst Johannsen, Westfront tells the story of a group of German soldiers at the front.

It was totally different from previous films with the same subject because it denounced the absurdity of the war—the ravages of which had been as much evident behind the lines as at the front—and because it treated its theme in an extremely realistic style.