Diário de uma Garota Perdida

Who would have guessed that these two collaborated in a film superior to Pandora's Box. Pabst and Brooks were a rare combination indeed, and must serve as another decisive exception to the auteur theory. Having just viewed both, I think a case can be made that the Lost Girl film is actually superior to the admittedly better known film. How Krackhaeur could have ignored the value of these two films in his "Caligari to Hitler" book is indeed baffling. The scenes in the "foster" home are fascinating and may indeed say something about the authoritarian mindset of 20s Germany. (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is another good example)

Louise Brooks is Thymian, a girl with an unfortunate tendency to swoon in the arms of unscrupulous men. She has an unwanted baby and, abandoned by her father and cruel mother-in-law is sent to a harsh reformatory from which she escapes only to wake up one morning and discover she is a prostitute. Brooks is charming and effective as Thymian, a delicate, kind-hearted girl whose innocence is only cruelly taken advantage of - she certainly has no trouble getting us on her side and it's partly to do with the sense of childish happiness you feel is ready to burst out of her despite the adversity. She looks even cuter with her hair slicked back in the workhouse. Not as powerful and bleakly tragic as Pandora's Box, made the same year - but, with plenty of humour and some outrageous characterisations, is probably more entertaining.

Louise Brooks stars as Thymian, the teenage daughter of a well-to-do pharmacist (Josef Rovensky). When Thymian is taken advantage of by her father's sleazy assistant Meinert (Fritz Rasp), she becomes pregnant. After the baby is born and given up for adoption, Thymian is sent to a reform school, where the harsh treatment sends her on to an even darker, more troubled future.

The source material was a scandalous novel by Margarete Bohme, and the film seems to be going for moral shock and titillation. Rasp is terrific in his defining role as the shark-like predatory Meinert. This was Brooks and Pabst's second collaboration, after 1928's Pandora's Box. Both films have developed a following since their release, and Brooks has become something of an iconic cult figure. But it's mainly from her appearance, as her performances are rather a blank slate. Some viewers may project more depth or nuance onto her, but to me she's a pretty mannequin. I wish the copy I had seen was better, and a top-to-bottom restoration would add much to film's appeal, I think.

When I startes watching "Diary of a lost girl" my expectation was that this was a twin film of "Pandora's box" (1929, Georg Wilhelm Pabst). Both films were a Pabst / Louise Brooks collaboration and in both films (I thought) the Louise Brooks character (Lulu in "Pandora's box" and Thymian in "Diary of a lost girl") symbolized the decadence of the roaring twenties.

I was surprised that after all Thymian is entirely different from Lulu. Lulu is a call girl (who ends badly), and Thymian is in the first place a victim of a society in which it is "normal" that men satisfy their sexual needs and women pay the price. Because Thymian differs from Lulu, "Diary of a lost girl" differs from "Pandora's box". In effect "Diary of a lost girl" is more akin to "The joyless street" (1925, Georg Wilhelm Pabst).

One of the lead actress of "The joyless street" was Greta Garbo. For her the Pabst film was the start of her career. For Louise Brooks it was the end. She was too independent for the Hollywood dream factory. In retrospect however the two films she made with Pabst gave her immortality (some decades later).

Apart from the Thymian character I was amazed by the rather obvious lesbian character of the matron of the reformatory Thymian is sent to (when she has "to pay the price"). The film was however made outside Hollywood in the first place and before the production code in the second. The actress playing this role (Valeska Gert) is moreover another link to "The joyless street". In this film she plays Frau Greifer, who runs a nightclub annex brothel.

You must have Pabst in your life at some point. Time it well, seek out a few silents beforehand. It was an exciting era for movies anyway, you're going to have a lot of fun. Context will be valuable. That is because Pabst does not set out to impress on the scope of Lang or Murnau, who impress easily, and you may be fooled that he's pretty ordinary. Not so. I rate him as the top German filmmaker of the time, the man had a truly subtle , humane touch that cut deep.

It may seem as pretty ordinary, this one. It's melodrama about a hapless young girl who is neglected and abused: unwanted pregnancy, forced marriage, reformatory, prostitution. It is a journey of maturity that takes her through many worlds, most of them depressing. DW Griffith would have done this in somber , sanctimonious tones. Chaplin could do it frivolously, with a bit of kindly fate in the machine of sorrow. Pabst did it another way, and it's his way that most likely has influenced our contemporary understanding of cinematic melodrama as something quite pure and sophisticated.

That sophistication is seeking ways to deliver both the redemptive story and many ways, different paths to reason and emotion, some of them shrouded in dream, and seems to have carried on from here to Sirk to elsewhere and Lynch.

I want to devote this comment to all these items of, let's say, peripheral narrative vision. You can read up a description of the story in the other comments.

There's Louise Brooks for one, exquisite beauty even among movie queens of the silent era. But Pabst was sensitive; unlike Sternberg in Blue Angel, he doesn't frame her for sex, trusting the male gaze to work the usual way anyway. Brooks both here and in Pandora's Box is a spirited , swanlike creature.

There are four worlds that she travels through, possibly more. Each one revealed by the treatment of sex. The first is the parental nest, sex is covert yet (the tryst with the maid) and she is a sheltered child, naive and innocent of finer implications around her. The film begins portentously with a suicide and a man promising truth of the story. In a roundabout way he does, by exploiting sexual vulnerability.

The second world is at the reformatory: it is a simplistic world with stock villains (matron - guard) where expressions of sexuality are forbidden. Here others administer decisions and she only has to obey the story. It is very much a stepdown into childhood, but in a way that is painfully clear to her (in the parent's nest, she had illusions of freedom). A revolt is staged and she escapes.

What she doesn't know, is that she escapes to a high-class brothel. We find out as she does, when an envelope full of money arrives the morning after a night of drinking, merrymaking and sex. But - as sex enters the picture - so this is a world now where people are ambiguous figures, not always villains. Here a creep looking for sex is repudiated, only for the kind protector to assume his place: this man has noble aspirations to save the girls, but he'd much rather have a good time. He's a bit of a hypocrite, but it would be a puritanical stretch to think him bad. Here she learns to endure and persist.

Now for the best part. The narrative is on the top level in the form of excerpts from a diary. But, you will note steadily the introduction of more and more subtle, visual dislocations from the ordinary.

That male gaze mysteriously lulls her to sleep both times she has sex. Both times it's against her will, both times signify a turn in the gear of the world. The second time is accompanied by the bedroom door inexplicably opening ajar by its own self, and then the lover and a sedated Louise in his arms waltz into frame. It's a heady , seductive shot.

It's obvious what Pabst is getting at - she succumbs to the role expected of her - but in doing so, succeeds in demanding from us a different set of reasoning tools for the rest of the film. There are several more shots of her asleep in the hands of men, as though dreaming her whole ordeal. Dance is a main thread, and wrapped around the recurring notion of deciding the depth of your performance.

That different set of tools is, at the same time as the world around her changes, and demands each time a different response, getting to note semiconscious spillovers inside of her.

This aspect of the work is amazing. Look how, in both the reformatory and brothel, she is part of a chorus of girls, usually framed with two or more girls hovering beside her, and it's that chorus instead of just herself that is experiencing the story, as though part of that fragile self has splintered by the trauma, and each splintered self has taken mirrored shape around her to shoulder part of the pain. (compare to the brothel scenes from Inland Empire)

The fourth world is having learned to cope, and that allows her to return to the early stages of the story, starting with another scene of dance and frolicking by the beach, and eventually save one of those splintered selves from the same fate.

Something to meditate upon.