Lulu in Rochester: Louise Brooks and the cinema screen as a tabula rasa

This paper explores the question of why Louise Brooks has come to be regarded as one of the great stars of silent cinema, and why the two films she made with G. W. Pabst, 'Pandora's Box' and 'Diary of a Lost Girl', are now regarded as classics of silent European Cinema. By any standards, Brooks was not an important actor at the time, and this paper traces and analyses the events that led to the re-evaluation of Brooks' as a seminal figure of silent cinema.