Pabst's Secrets of A Soul

Lowry mentions Pabst's Secrets of A Soul in his filmscript for Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is The Night in a sequence where the character Dick Divers walks past cinemas on Broadway in New York where this film is showing.

Secrets of a Soul (German: Geheimnisse einer Seele) is a 1926 silent German drama film directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst.



Psychoanalysis was still a novelty to most people at the time this film was made. Pabst, who was very interested in Freud's writings, had the freedom to make any film he wanted after the major success of The Joyless Street. He decided to do a film about a neurosis. The result, the story of a man who seeks help for unwanted violent thoughts, is notable for its innovative techniques, while at the same time demonstrating a naiveté concerning its subject matter that gives it a permanently dated quality.

A professor (Werner Krauss) finds himself increasingly troubled by a murder that occurs in his neighborhood. At the same time he has learned of the return from abroad of a man who was a childhood friend both of him and his wife. After a strange intense nightmare, he begins to notice, to his horror, that the thought of murdering his wife comes frequently into his mind, and with more of a feeling of compulsion as time goes on. A chance meeting with a kindly psychoanalyst (Pawel Pawloff) leads to a long period of therapy, by which he eventually gains insight into the unconscious thoughts and motives that were causing his neurosis. He is cured, happily returning to the security of a loving marriage. Read more on Cine Scene.com

Pabst's Don Quixote 1933

Built on an incline above them a cinema was showing Chaliapin and George Robey in Pabst's Don Quixote.... Malcolm Lowry 30th June 1934.

Lowry mentions Pabst's film in his story, as the protagonist Bill Goodyear returns to England from France arriving in Folkestone. Goodyear sees the film playing in a cinema near to Folkestone Harbour railway station.

Adventures of Don Quixote (1933) is the English title of a film adaptation of the classic Miguel de Cervantes novel, directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst, starring the famous operatic bass Feodor Chaliapin. Although the film stars Chaliapin, it is not an opera; however, he does sing three songs in it. It is the first sound film version of the Spanish classic. The supporting cast in the English version includes George Robey, René Donnio, Miles Mander, Lydia Sherwood, Renée Valliers, and Emily Fitzroy. The film was made in three versions -- French, English, and German -- with Chaliapin starring in all three versions.

Read more at Dennis Grunes

Pabst's The Love Of Jeanne Ney 1927

This film was included in the Cambridge Film Guild's 1929-30 season and may have formed part of Lowry's cinema education.

Georg Wilhelm Pabst (25 August 1885 – 29 May 1967) was an Austrian film director. Pabst was born in Raudnitz, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary (today's Roudnice nad Labem, Czech Republic), the son of a railroad employee.



Returning from the United States, he was in France when World War I began. He was interned there near Brest until 1919.

Some of his most famous films concern the plight of women in German society, including The Joyless Street (1925) with Greta Garbo and Asta Nielsen, Geheimnisse einer Seele (1926) with Lili Damita, The Loves of Jeanne Ney (1927) with Brigitte Helm, Pandora's Box (1928), and Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), the last two starring American actress Louise Brooks. He also co-directed with Arnold Fanck a mountain film entitled The White Hell of Pitz Palu (1929) starring Leni Riefenstahl. Read more on Wikipedia

Read more about the film on Silent Era.com



Buy a copy at Amazon

Plus you can watch the entire film on You Tube

Cambridge Film Guild 1929-30 Season

Lowry had a life-long love of cinema which began with his childhood visits to cinemas in the Wirral area.

Paul Tiessen in his essay A Canadian Film Critic In Lowry's Cambridge has given us an insight of how that love of cinema developed when Lowry attended Cambridge University. At Cambridge, Lowry met Gerald Noxon then a Trinity College undergraduate. Noxon was a Canadian film critic and writer who helped shape Lowry's enthusiasm for film in the early part of their friendship.

Noxon was one of the founders of the Cambridge Experiment magazine which published an early Lowry story called Port Swettenham in Issue 5 of the magazine. Noxon was also the founding president of the Cambridge Film Guild.

Noxon with his wife Betty Lane

You can read more about Lowry's friendship with Noxon in Noxon's memoir Malcolm Lowry 1930 available in Malcolm Lowry: Psalms And Songs in which Noxon details their shared passion for cinema and jazz. Lowry and Noxon also exchanged letters for many years which are available in The Letters of Malcolm Lowry and Gerald Noxon, 1940-1952.

Noxon exposed Cambridge University students to the some of the best European cinema of the period - "in order to afford people interested in the Cinema an opportunity of seeing films which are otherwise unavailable to them."

Tiessen in his essay details the following films which were shown:

The 1929-30 programme included:

Pabst's The Love Of Jeanne Ney 1927
Epstein's Finis Terrae 1929
Cavalcanti's En Rade 1927
Feyder's Therese Raquin 1928
Clair's Les Deux Timides 1928
Eisenstein's The General Line 1929
Kozintsev and Trauberg's CBD 1927
Turin's Turk-Sib 1929
Pudovkin's The End Of St Petersburg 1927
Pudovkin's Storm Over Asia 1928

1930-31 programme included:

Pudovkin's The End Of St Petersburg 1927
Vertov's Man With A Movie camera 1929
Dovzhenko's Earth 1930
Room's The Ghost That Never Returns 1930

Some of the above films are referenced in Lowry's letters and other writings.

Tiessen in several pieces and Kilgallin in his 1973 book Lowry have written about Lowry and cinema. However, there is still considerable scope for further research and a larger piece of work pulling together Lowry's visits to cinemas on the Wirral, his Cambridge days and a visit to Germany and his love of German Expressionist cinema, the time he spent in Hollywood as an abortive screen-writer, the fact he married a film actress Margerie Bonner, his film-script for Tender Is The Night (Tiessen did a fine job on the edition published in The Cinema Of Malcolm Lowry), the many references to films in all his work including his letters as well as the impact of cinema on his writing style.

In subsequent posts, I will offer up clips, posters, photographs detailing the films in the Cambridge Film Guild between 1929-31.

Vertov's Man With A Movie Camera 1930