Louise Brooks and Francis Lederer in Pandora’s Box
Ever wonder how a deteriorating film can be given a second life? Ahead of our Silent Movie Day screening of the new 2K restoration of the 1929 masterpiece Pandora’s Box, learn more about this incredible film, its far-reaching cultural and cinematic impact, and the painstaking lengths it took to return it to its former glory with the following video essay from Dr. Claudy Op den Kamp, who served as a restoration producer for Pandora’s Box with Haghefilm Conservation in Amsterdam.
Ed. note: if you want to avoid spoilers about the ending, skip from 3:43 to 4:00.
Claudy Op den Kamp is Principal Academic in Film at Bournemouth University and faculty member at the Centre for Intellectual Property Policy & Management. She was a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, in 2022; a Fellow at the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History, in 2023; and is currently a British Research Council Fellow at the Library of Congress.
Claudy holds a PhD (Art & Media) from the University of Plymouth on the relationship between copyright ownership, access to archival film, and film historiography. She is a graduate of the University of Amsterdam (Film & Television Studies) and the University of East Anglia (Film Archiving). She has also worked as a Film Restoration Project Leader at the Nederlands Filmmuseum and as a senior research assistant in the DIASTOR research project, which was located at the University of Zurich. Claudy is the author of The Greatest Films Never Seen: The Film Archive and the Copyright Smokescreen (Amsterdam University Press, 2018); co-editor of A History of Intellectual Property in 50 Objects (Cambridge University Press, 2019), which she also designed; and the writer and director of the audio-visual essays “The Shadow Line” (2022), “Opening Pandora’s Box” (2023), and “Evidence of Things Not Present” (2024).
Join IU Cinema for a special 95th anniversary screening of Pandora’s Box on September 29 at 1pm.