Lulu's Smile: An Archive of Trauma in Die Büchse der Pandora (1929)

Abstract

This article focuses on Lulu, the protagonist of G. W. Pabst's 1929 film Die Büchse der Pandora, and argues that her frequent smiles are a post‐traumatic affect. From the little information that the audience is given about Lulu, it can be deduced that she is a survivor of sex trafficking. Lulu's smile, with its incongruity and automatic nature, is where her past becomes most legible. I read Lulu's smiles throughout the film as an archive of trauma, as conceptualized by scholars from queer studies and Black studies such as Ann Cvetkovich, Christina Sharpe, and Saidiya Hartman. While Weimar film scholarship often considers Lulu as a femme fatale or a Neue Frau, her implicitly traumatic past is seldom addressed, let alone read as a central trait of her character. This article presents a new reading of Lulu in relation to trauma studies.