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THE FILM SINCE THEN
refused to believe it for was he not the apotheosis of selfsacrificing democrats? As for the rumour that all during those years in Paris when he wras supervising kitsch he had actually been an agent of Otto Abetz, we dismissed it as crude and unfounded slander. For my part, it took the evidence of the senses to convince me. Sitting in an Army projection-theatre in 1944, I saw before me the credit : Paracelsus : Regie : G. W. Pabst. After that, even I saw the light, and not from the credit-title alone. Paracelsus itself was proof positive. Vast, pretentious, impressive, shot in the Barrandov studios near Prague, it presented Werner Krauss, of all actors, as the apostle of Hitlerian enlightenment, and opposed to him none other than Fritz Rasp, the very Rasp of Jeanne Ney and Warning Shadows, no longer a symbol of decaying capitalism but a surrogate-figure for democratic science. This strange conglomeration was stage-managed and edited with all of Pabst's old-time brilliance, with superb camerawork and settings, but the result was a re-echoing emptiness, the shell of a film. Perhaps its director was, by then, the shell of a man?
Pabst's case is a subtle, knotty and perhaps an insoluble one.1 I give its history in some detail because, though extreme, it is an all too significant commentary on film commentators, including the present writer. Our record has been for too long one of absorption in technique for its own sake, or alternatively of accepting sociological intentions
1 Pabst is now known to be de-Nazified by the Austrian Government and has just completed a film in Austria called The Trial. (P.R.) Louise Brooks, whom Pabst brought to Germany from Hollywood in 1928 to play in Pandora's Box (vide pp. 270, 271) and whose whole life and career were altered thereby, told me (R.G.) in conversation that : ' None of us who knew Pabst well felt that we ever knew him at all. He was all things to all men, and nothing consistently. He would argue any side of any question with apparent complete conviction and sincerity, but to see this happen over and over was to suspect that he had no convictions at all. He worked like a scientist, presenting stimuli to his actors and watching their reactions with cold-blooded detachment. He never made any comment, never explained himself. I always felt he lived his life completely alone.' In contrast, the reader is referred to an interview with Pabst and Louise Brooks in Berlin at Christmas, 1928, by H.D. (Close Up, Vol. 4, No. 3, March, 1929).
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