FOR SEVERAL YEARS, things had become quiet around G. W. Pabst. On the few occasions I went to Vienna I usually dropped in at Schottenring 28 to see the great old man. He was always pleased to have visitors, though he had grown rather tired and his one hand trembled slightly. But it never occurred to me then that he was so much older than the other so-called "German" directors-most of them being Austrians like himself-and when I heard of his 80th birthday and wrote and got a rather trembling line of thanks from him back, I remembered how we first met.
It must have been some time in 1929, one of my first visits to a studio as a young journalist. Studios still seemed to me rather thrilling at that time�a sort of hot, colourful jungle with cables like creepers all over the floor. It was rather noisy in those days of silent film: people rushing to and fro on the plateau and on the bridge where the lamps hung, machines heated to the utmost for lighting and atmosphere. Everything seemed dense and stifling.
In a corner sat a very beautiful girl reading the aphorisms of Schopenhauer in an English translation. It seemed absurd that such a beautiful girl should be reading Schopenhauer, and I thought quite angrily that this was some sly publicity stunt of Pabst's. Some twenty-five years later, I found out that Louise Brooks really did read Schopenhauer...Pabst, I remember told me that day how delighted he was with a completely new shot he had invented-mounting the camera on a mobile trolley with a turntable attached, for a single shot in which he wanted to follow Louise Brooks up a winding staircase and along a corridor.
Pabst was then at the height of his career, a powerful man with piercing eyes, full of energy and rather ironical; nevertheless, even when working under pressure in the studio, very amiable and considerate. One always felt he had been an actor; there was something flexible about him, something slightly elusive. He was not yet the "champion of realism" he was to become some years later. At that time all the great German directors were rivals and even enemies; Pabst's principal rival was Fritz Lang and they disliked each other heartily. But they had the same ardour and tenacity: pioneers who loved to discover new and unthought of possibilities for the camera.
I really got to know Pabst more thoroughly when I had fled to Paris in 1933, after Hitler's rise to power. His situation was different from that of the rest of us-other refugees like Lang, Kortner, Peter Lorre, whom I met quite often. Pabst was already "established" as a French film director, known all over the place. Catherine Hessling, first wife of Jean Renoir, had asked me to come to the studio where Pabst was shooting Du Haut en Bas, a film about the destinies of people in an apartment house. (I remember, by the way, meeting there a young and still unknown actor called Jean Gabin who 1 thought, had quite a future in his somehow sympathetic, rough and still clumsy way.)
At that time I saw quite a bit of both Lang and Pabst, each reproaching me with "why do you see so much of that dreadful person?" I remember how Pabst one day told me about a film he would love to shoot; and I wrote about it some years later (around 1938), when Henri Langlois and Georges Franju were publishing their shortlived and now very rare journal called Cinema-tographe. This was the heroic period of the Cinemathetique Francaise: without a house, without money, with just some trunks full of treasures, a bathroom full of films, and a small cineclub called le cercle du cinema.
I was fascinated by this film which Pabst never shot. It was to be played on a packetboat, out at sea with an elegant international crowd of passengers. Suddenly the radio operator intercepts a message: war has been declared. And all of a sudden everyone mistrusts everyone else; people who seemed decent disclose how mean they can be; hatred grows wildly; terrible things are said and happen-even murder. Then, when everyone is at his worst, the boat reaches land and one finds out that there is no war, that the radio operator has gone crazy and invented it all. And the mood becomes one of shame at what has happened. A characteristic subject for Pabst and his "X-ray eye camera", as Close Up used to call his supple method of analysing psychological intention.
The war Pabst had imagined for his film was already hanging over all of us; and when it came Pabst had left France and we had other things on our minds. I plunged underground and when, after liberation, I came up again, I heard strange rumours about the man who had made Mademoiselle Docteur and had later shot films in Nazi Germany. Had he really been, as some people pretended, a spy?
In 1946 I had to go to Vienna and Henri Langlois asked me to see Pabst. I went, I remember, rather reluctantly. He came to greet me with arms outstretched. And I said: "G.W I don't come as an old friend, but sent by the Cinemathetique Francaise." He was upset that I could have believed all those rumours, and begged me to question him. So I asked why he had been in Berlin at the time of Munich, and in Vienna when war broke out. He proved to me that he had been in Berlin because his father-in-law had been ill and died there-here was the death notice. And the same thing had happened to his own father in Vienna, at the beginning of the war. Then fate had pursued him: here were still the tickets for his and his family's passage to the States. But he had had to lift a heavy trunk and injured himself-here was the bill for the clinic where he had his operation. I told him rather harshly that in Edgar Wallace's stories (which Bert Brecht had taught me to read for relaxation), the man with the perfect alibi was always the guilty one ...
So fate and his wife's demands sent him back to Germany, where he shot films which no longer had the force of Kameradschaft and Westfront 1918. (Pabst could not resist filming-it was as though he was on that packetboat he had told me about, and as weak as his own gay international crowd. Pointless to ask what might have become of him if his A Modern Hero had been a success, and he had stayed like Fritz Lang in the United States...) He was very enthusiastic then about Der Prozess, the new film he wanted to shoot. And I felt that he meant this film to be a sort of atonement.
Years passed, years that somehow buried all the resentment we had felt. Der Prozess had been quite a success, and his reputation was restored. But the films he shot after that (except for one of his Hitler pictures) lacked the old strength. It was somehow not the old Pabst any more-the strong man of the left wing. I met him again in Munich. And even if he seemed once more the brilliant, witty, assured talker, there hung about him a cloud of despair he could never quite overcome. An attitude, however, which made you feel closer to him.
Last time I saw him in Vienna he was an old, tired man, trying to live up from time to time to his great pre-war name. And I wondered if Pabst, had he been able to shoot his film about the packetboat, might have had the strength to resist the temptation to direct films in Hitler's Germany. And I try to think of him now as the great director of Pandora's Box, Diary of a Lost Girl, and the sound films belonging to the era before 1933.