A fresh look at a director who ‘sinned’

There were four great giants of the German silent cinema: F.W. Murnau, Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Lang and Georg Wilhelm Pabst.

Unlike his peers, though, Pabst has been underappreciated and misunderstood. He’s perhaps better known for the actresses he cast in his movies -- such as the bob-haired Louise Brooks in “Pandora’s Box” and “Diary of Lost Girl” or Greta Garbo on “The Joyless Street” -- than his work as a filmmaker.

But in recent years, critics and historians have been reexamining Pabst’s films and place in cinema history; in turn, the UCLA Film & Television Archive is paying tribute to the Austrian-born director with a nine-film retrospective. “The Films of G.W. Pabst” continues through Feb. 7 at the James Bridges Theater.

“I think that for a long time Pabst was undervalued,” says Jan-Christopher Horak, curator of the Hollywood Entertainment Museum, who introduced Saturday’s opening program of Brooks movies.

Part of the reason his reputation suffered was that after an unsuccessful attempt at a career in Hollywood -- he made only one film, the poorly received 1934 drama “A Modern Hero” -- he went back home to Austria and made two films under the Nazi regime during World War II.

David Pendleton, UCLA programmer, says no one knows for sure why Pabst returned to his homeland. “There is a lot of conjecture,” he says. “I think he claimed at one point that he did book passage on a ship to leave Europe but was cut off when the war started. I think that has been shown to be false.”

For most critics and historians, it was an “unpardonable” sin that he made films for the Third Reich. Before the Nazi regime, Horak says, “he was the champion of the left as a filmmaker, unlike Lang, who was pretty conservative in his Germany period. It was a sin a lot of them couldn’t forget.”

“He made a conscious effort to make films after the war to try and redeem himself,” Pendleton says. One of those films was the 1955 drama “The Last Ten Days,” which screens at UCLA on Sunday. The drama is based on firsthand accounts of those who were in Hitler’s bunker during the last 10 days of the war. “It is clearly meant to be an antiwar and anti-Nazi statement,” Pendleton says. “But it seems to want to separate good Germans from bad Nazis. Some have seen the film as a refusal to effectively engage the question of the relationship between the German nation and the Nazi party.”

Critics who subscribe to the “auteur” theory (in which the director puts his own stamp on each of his films, becoming the “author”) felt that Pabst’s work was “all over the map,” Horak says. “He made social critic films like ‘Westfront 1918,’ then he made psychological films, and then he made films that were completely misunderstood, films that were very, very cool and unemotional and distant, and for a lot of the auteurist critics that’s not what they savored.”

UCLA, says Pendelton, has long wanted to examine the work of Pabst but had trouble finding good prints of his films. “We basically programmed the series to show the best prints we could find. The task was made somewhat simpler in that there was a large Pabst retrospective at the Berlin Film Festival a few years ago, and since then a number of our fellow organizations have done Pabst retrospectives.”

Other films in the UCLA retrospective include 1927’s “The Love of Jeanne Ney” (today), a complex political drama and romance revolving around the Russian Revolution and the Parisian upper class; a newly restored print from the Munich Film Museum of 1925’s “The Joyless Street” (Friday) with a young Garbo as the daughter of a middle-class government employee who sells herself after her father loses all his money in a major business decision; 1930’s “Westfront 1918” (Sunday), Pabst’s first sound film, which explores the horrors of World War I through the eyes of four soldiers from different backgrounds; and 1931’s “The Threepenny Opera” (Feb. 7), which is based on the musical by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht.

“Threepenny,” says Pendleton, “is an odd attempt to fuse the sort of Brechtian experimentalism with the realism of early sound film, and I think that’s one of the things that makes it so interesting.” But Weill and Brecht didn’t like it and sued the production company.

Despite his setbacks, Pabst’s film career endured for 33 years. He retired in 1956 and died in 1967 at the age of 81.

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‘The Films of G.W. Pabst’

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What: A retrospective of the Austrian-born director’s work.

Where: James Bridges Theater, UCLA campus, Westwood

Price: $7, general; $5, students, seniors and UCLA Alumni Assn. members

Contact: (310) 206-FILM or www.cinema.ucla.edu

Schedule:

Today at 7:30 p.m.: “Secrets of a Soul” and “The Love of Jeanne Ney”

Friday at 7:30 p.m.: “The Joyless Street”

Sunday at 7 p.m.: “The Last Ten Days” and “Westfront 1918”

Feb. 7 at 7:30 p.m.: “The Threepenny Opera” and “The Mistress of Atlantis”