G.W. Pabst: The high art of lurid lives

If ever there were a case to be made that a director, armed with a thorough understanding of human nature and the talent to express it, can transform lurid melodrama into high art, then G.W. Pabst’s “Pandora’s Box” and “Diary of a Lost Girl” are the best arguments.

The German master’s two most famous films, which made their American star, Louise Brooks, a screen immortal, launch a Pabst retrospective at the UCLA Film and Television Archive on Saturday.

In 1929’s “Pandora’s Box,” Brooks plays Lulu, the mistress of a newspaper publisher (Fritz Kortner). In her totally amoral, casual way, Brooks’ Lulu leads him to his destruction and then does the same to his son (Francis Lederer).

Neither these men nor a costume-designing countess (Belgian actress Alice Roberts, playing the screen’s first explicit lesbian) can possess so free a creature as Lulu, thus inciting what Brooks herself described as “sexual hatred.” This evocation of the ultimate femme fatale was derived from two Frank Wedekind plays.

Even if “Diary of a Lost Girl” (1929) isn’t as complex, it is a fine achievement. Brooks plays a young woman who, seduced and abandoned, winds up in a strict reformatory and then in a brothel. With their remarkable rapport, Brooks and Pabst turned a Victorian tale into a timeless story of hypocrisy forgiven and of good triumphant over evil.

Although “Secrets of a Soul” (1926), which screens Wednesday, seems today a decidedly simplistic illustration of the workings of Freudian psychoanalysis, Pabst’s masterful Expressionist style and Werner Krauss’ acute performance as a tormented chemist still resonate. The powerful images and emotions overcome the didactic script.

The middle-aged, unprepossessing chemist is happily married to the much younger and radiantly beautiful Lili Damita (best remembered as Errol Flynn’s first wife), but the arrival of her dashing cousin (Jack Trevor) triggers the chemist’s breakdown. He fears he may even kill her. Psychoanalysis brings his subconscious conflicts to the surface; his long-repressed childhood memories are conflated with reports of a recent murder case.

“The Love of Jeanne Ney” (1927), which screens after “Secrets,” is a major Pabst work, a brisk, romantic adventure set against the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. Jeanne (Edith Jehanne), daughter of a French diplomat in the Crimea, falls in love with Andreas (Uno Henning), a handsome Russian officer -- and Bolshevik agent. They’re reunited in Paris after the revolution, but they’re menaced by the evil Khalibiev (Fritz Rasp, the German cinema’s definitive creepy villain), who coveted Jeanne back in the Crimea. This complicated tale also incorporates a subplot involving Khalibiev and Jeanne’s relatives that allows Pabst to lament postwar malaise. The Paris setting is superbly photographed by Fritz Arno Wagner and Robert Lach in a beautifully modulated black and white that recalls Eugene Atget’s classic images of the City of Light.

Fresh air from Iran

The UCLA Film and Television Archive’s 14th annual Celebration of Iranian Cinema continues Friday with Parviz Shahbazi’s captivating, vibrant “Deep Breath.” Once past a deft, jolting opening sequence, it flashes back to tell a story that is entirely unexpected for the Iranian cinema.

Kamran (Said Amini) is a gravely handsome student about to drop out from his university. He’s from a wealthy, indulgent family, while his best his pal, tousle-haired, lively Mansour (Mansour Shahbazi), is broke.

They are a disaffected, aimless pair, not above stealing, including a car that will take them on a spree. They aren’t killers or bank robbers; they simply want to hit the road and do as they please.

Their restless exploits take on a new dimension when Mansour becomes smitten with a pretty -- and very talkative and adventurous -- student, Ayda (Maryam Palizban). The way these three carry on and how their fate plays out has been the stuff of countless American and European films, even some from Asia, but is radical for the Iranian cinema.

What is fascinating is that unlike most venturesome Iranian films, “Deep Breath” is not specifically critical of life in a theocracy, and indeed its three young principals are notable for their uninhibited lack of respect for authority of any kind. (Of course, Ayda wears a chador, but she puts it to teasing, seductive purposes.) It’s not hard to imagine conservative Iranian audiences taking the film as a cautionary tale, but Shahbazi would seem to be making a larger point: that an Islamic society is not immune to young people finding life meaningless in a depersonalized modern world.

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Screenings

UCLA Film and Television Archive

The Films of G. W. Pabst: “Pandora’s Box” and “Diary of

a Lost Girl,” Saturday, 7:30 p.m.; “Secrets of a Soul” and “The Love of Jeanne Ney,” Wednesday,

7:30 p.m.

14th annual Celebration of Iranian Cinema: “Deep Breath,” Friday, 7:30 p.m.

Where: James Bridges Theater, Melnitz Hall, UCLA campus, Westwood

Info: (310) 206-FILM