Essay by Thomas Gladysz (8)
 
Things began to change in the mid-1950s. James Card, a passionate devotee of silent movies and the founder and first curator of the Department of Film at the George Eastman House of Photography in Rochester, New York, saw Pandora’s Box at the Cinémathèque Française, which then held one of the few known copies of the film. Card was bowled over.

He acquired a print from the Danish Film Museum, another holder, and returned home. Though the print was incomplete and in need of considerable work, Card showed Pandora’s Box along with Pabst’s Diary of a Lost Girl (also with Brooks) to audiences slowly catching up with—as renowned German critic Lotte Eisner put it in the 1950s—Brooks’s “miraculous” performance.