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By JANET MASLIN, 9/1991
"The Other Eye" examines the career of G.W.Pabst,
the Austrian-born director who is best known for his work with Louise
Brooks ("Pandora's Box," "Diary of a Lost Girl")
and least well known for those films he made under the auspices of the
Third Reich. This documentary by Johanna Heer and Werner Schmiedel pays
particular attention to the latter chapter in Pabst's life, and to the
connections between an artist's work and the political climate in which
it is engendered.
Interviewing an assortment of film scholars and first-hand observers
of Pabst's work, the film makers assemble a meandering but often illuminating
portrait. Among those providing details of Pabst's history are Anne
Friedberg of the University of California, who discusses the director's
collaboration with Sigmund Freud in the 192O's on "Secrets of a
Soul," a film that attempted to dramatize the process of Freudian
analysts and included some remarkable dream sequences, which are glimpsed
here briefly in film clips. Ms. Friedberg, in one of the film's many
interesting digressions, also mentions an attempted collaboration between
Freud and Samuel Goldwyn that would surely have been bizarre had it
come to pass.
Francis Lederer, looking remarkably fit and vigorous here, describes
his acting experiences in "Pandora's Box" with Brooks. "Naturally,
it was like talking to a sphinx," he says of the actress, with
whom he did not share a common language at the time. Harold Nebenzal,
whose father, Seymour, was the producer of much of Pabst's best work,
recalls a close friendship between the two families. The great cinematographer
Henri Alekan describes Pabst's way of holding preproduction meetings
and welcoming ideas from members of his cast and crew, which was unusual
for its time.
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The sense of
Pabst that emerges from the first part of the film is often scholarly
but impersonal. Much more is revealed, for instance, about his relations
with a film journal that especially revered him than about what sort
of character and background he brought to his work. Only when it focuses
on Pabst's return to Europe, after a largely unsuccessful stint in Hollywood,
does the film take on much urgency.
The directors are quite clear in excoriating a director who worked under
the watchful eye of Joseph Goebbels, no matter how seemingly apolitical
his films may have been.
Although "The Other Eye" includes numerous clips from Pabst's
films, even more would have been welcome, especially of those films
whose underlying meanings are most in dispute here. Glimpses of two
costume films made under the Nazi regime, "Comedians" and
"Paracelsus," are intriguing but brief.
"For goodness' sake', I didn't think politics had anything to do
with it!" exclaims the actress Hilde Krahl, who appeared as a young
girl in "Comedians." But Ms. Krahl later bursts into tears,
quite movingly, in describing her own remorse over having remained in
Germany during the war. Pabst, it is noted, often brandished unused
tickets for an ocean crossing and spoke of sudden illness and the outbreak
of war to explain why he himself did not leave.
After the war, Pabst made some notable efforts to come to terms with
the Nazi past; the film includes clips from "The Trial," with
a scene set in a synagogue, and "The Last Ten Days," depicting
Adolph Hitler in his bunker. "I believe it was a very difficult
time for my father," says Michael Pabst, the director's son, with
considerable understatement.
"Pabst never knew the impression it made to go back in l939,"
says Jean Oser, another of the director's frequent collaborators. As
the film makes clear, the director may not have understood the implications
of his actions at the time, but they became unavoidable for him later.
"The Other Eye" will be shown tonight at 6:15 as part
of the New York Film Festival.
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