Trois pages d'un journal

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.

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)

This excellent drama accomplishes the difficult task of being quite earthy, and often grim, in the ways that it depicts its characters and their lives, yet at the same time being an ultimately uplifting story about the possibilities of human understanding. It also features a fine performance by Louise Brooks. Her performance in "Diary of a Lost Girl" is on a par with that in "Pandora's Box", her other celebrated collaboration with G.W. Pabst.

The story has Brooks as a pharmacist's daughter whose young life is drastically changed by events that she can only dimly understand. From then on, she must endure a variety of trials while gradually learning some important lessons, often with only the barest help from those around her. The role contrasts nicely with her role in "Pandora's Box". Both in that film and in "Diary of a Lost Girl", she has the same level of energy and appeal, but in the former movie, right from the beginning she was very much the catalyst for the other characters' actions, while here she begins as an innocent youth who is completely at the mercy of all of the others, and then grows as the movie proceeds.

The settings are well-chosen so as both to contrast with her character, and to develop it. Her experiences show many aspects of the seamier side of both human nature and human living, and yet this is by no means a mere gratuitous display of sordidness, but rather a growing experience for Brooks's character. It culminates in an uplifting finale that is all the more effective for having arisen from material that is by no means idealistic.

The expressionistic style in the photography, lighting, and sets enhances the atmosphere and also the effectiveness of the story and the characters. The slightly stylized nature of both works quite well, and all of this contributes significantly to the high quality of the movie.

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.

It isn't difficult to see why Georg Wilhelm Pabst's Diary of a Lost Girl caused a bit of a headache for the censors back in 1929. Even for a movie made during the Weimar Republic era, a revolutionary time for cinema when directors were consistently pushing the boundaries with controversial tales of debauchery and Germany's seedy underbelly, the themes and social insight feel unnervingly modern. Teaming up once again with his muse Louise Brooks, the Kansas-born starlet plays Thymian, the naive daughter of a wealthy pharmacist who, in the opening scene, watches their maid leave the family home in shame when Thymian's father (Josef Rovensky) gets her pregnant.

Although it's clear to the audience, Thymian is puzzled as to why the girl has left. Her father's assistant, the creepy and much older Meinert (Fritz Rasp), invites her to the pharmacy that night on the promise to tell her everything, but instead takes advantage of the young girl and gets her pregnant. When the baby arrives, Thymian refuses to reveal who the father is but her family learn the truth from her diary, and insist that the two marry to avoid damage to the family's reputation. When she refuses, Thymian's baby is taken from her and she is packed off to a reformatory watched over by the intimidating director (Andrews Engelmann) and his tyrannical wife (Valeska Gert). After rebelling against the school, Thymian and a friend escape and join a brothel,

Like many films made during the Weimar era, Diary of a Lost Girl depicts the decay in almost every aspect of German society at the time. The lives of the rich are stripped bare, and their motivations are heavily questioned when the family send Thymian away not with her 'rehabilitation' in mind, but simply to save face. The reformatory itself is a cold and bleak place, where the director's wife bangs a rhythm for the inhabitants to rigidly eat their soup too. They are less concerned with helping the girls fit back into the society that has failed them, and more about satisfying their own sadistic desires. In one particularly effective close-up, the wife seems to be achieving some sort of sexual gratification from her monstrous behaviour.

The one place Thymian feels accepted on any sort of level is the brothel, a place where she can be herself without any kind of judgement or fear of social exile. While Thymian can at times be frustratingly naive and swoonish whenever she finds herself in the arms of a man, Louise Brooks delivers a tour de force performance that helps the audience maintain sympathy for her put-upon character, even when the film is at its most melodramatic. Even though the film is now 87 years old, Brooks's acting feels completely modern. Where most silent actors switch between rigid and operatic in their performances, Brooks is naturalistic and subtle, making it clear just why Pabst was so eager to work with her again after Pandora's Box, made the same year.