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While it was chance as much as anything else that led G. W. Pabst to direct the first film to deal explicitly with psychoanalytic therapy, Geheimnisse einer Seele [GS, Secrets of a soul] , there is also arguably a particular, albeit ambivalent, affinity between his topics and techniques and those of psychoanalysis. Rentschler (1990) suggests that the exploration of psychoanalytic treatment in GS is also an ambiguous vehicle for the analysis of filmic treatment. On the one hand, the director is seen here as an alter ego of the ordering analyst, working towards an apparently successful narrative resolution of the case. On the other, the analytic treatment produces what might be called a neurotic compromise with the fantasies that the film releases and that threaten to exceed its control. Psychoanalysis will always look for evidence of how film serves to represent the repressed, but this first psychoanalytic film shows evidence of a repressive tendency that inheres in its appropriation of psychoanalytic material and method. It opens a Pandora's box of psychical secrets and then struggles to find closure for it.
The resolution of therapy and film narrative in GS, Rentschler argues, is ‘overly emphatic, almost hysterically thorough’ (1990, p. 7). And this symptomatic excess of control, in its turn, can be linked to various more unruly aspects of the film's aesthetic management: mismatches and unresolved enigmas that subvert its styling. I would like to suggest that Pandora's box [BP] displays similar symptomatic features, that its highly finished and ordered surface is broken and knotted at certain points by the psychical disorder that it conceals. While Pabst famously introduced an oblique and fluid style of editing into filmmaking, one that tends to hide its cuts and smooth its knots, elements of disjuncture are also displayed here, as in the mismatches of point of view identified by Doane (1990, p. 67). The ‘Lulu’ (1996) plays by Wedekind upon which the film is based a