The film-historical fate of Georg Wilhelm Pabst is uniquely depressing. Is there another director who at one point was venerated with such fervour as one of the greatest and politically most important ever – the Red Pabst – who fell so far that his name would be mentioned almost only with disdain and regret. Contemporary critics, and until recently most film historians, couldn’t forgive him his two films made during the Nazi period. Therefore everything he did after WWII was tainted, and only films on Big Subjects such as The Trial (1948), Jackboot Mutiny and The Last Ten Days (both 1955) were looked at more seriously.
Geheimnisvolle Tiefe had no Big Subjects on offer, and was thus critically destroyed, while audiences also stayed at home. Seen today, Geheimnisvolle Tiefe reveals itself as a crystallisation of Pabst’s core interests – he was fascinated by the pleasures, pitfalls and perversions of sensuality and sex. The story of marital strife and despair, of a woman torn between possible lives as a scientist and a society lady, resembles the questions and tensions of Abwege (1928), while the subterranean settings connect it with the underground empire of L’Atlantide (1932). Pabst, here, looks into a scenery others use only as a landscape/setting or a mere story backdrop. With its glacial sense of irony, Geheimnisvolle Tiefe offers a view of the postwar world’s frosty inside that’s unlike anything else from the period.

Olaf Möller