The Diary of a Lost Girl

Made in 1929, The Diary of a Lost Girl is the second of two films shot in Germany by G. W. Pabst starring the American femme fatale Louise Brooks. (The first is Pandora’s Box, made the preceding year.) Brooks famous beauty is so utterly strange and astonishing that these movies have a curious oneiric quality; even very considerable glamour girls look wan next to her and the mise-en-scene seems a artifice designed to yield periodic, and hypnotic, close-ups of the fabulous leading lady. The passage of time has enhanced the close-up shots in these films; Brooks is so beautiful that Pabst doesn’t need to use soft light or veils and shadows in the manner of Sternberg. In many instances, he shoots her frontally in direct, unmediated light – the decades have rotted the film slightly causing highlights to bleed a little around the edges; in many shots, Brooks seems faintly haloed by her own shocking beauty, a translucent white apparition with enormous dark eyes glowing like embers in the center of the screen. Pabst was a great director in his own right, exceedingly versatile and inventive, and The Diary of a Lost Girl is shot in a matter-of-fact manner, brightly and objectively lit, without the spooky nuances and sculptural chiaroscuro of many German films from the twenties (for example, Pandora’s Box). The subject matter is sordid in the extreme, episodic, and gripping. A naïve and beautiful young girl is given a diary for her confirmation present. On the night of her confirmation, she is raped by a moronic-looking, simian pharmacist, gets pregnant and has his child. (The identity of the father is revealed by study of her diary). The child is deposited with a sinister Hebamme (midwife) who probably murders the unwanted baby and the heroine finds herself trapped in a horrific reform school. She escapes and becomes a whore in an upscale brothel. Apparently of noble blood, Brooks’ character, Thymian, is rescued by her Uncle, too late to save Thymian’s cousin, a feckless homosexual, who commits suicide. Thymian becomes a woman of great wealth, re-visits the brutal reform school, and rescues a girlfriend. The rich count pronounces the moral of the movie in the final title (in a manner similar to Tartuffe): “With love, all can be saved and no one is lost.” Pabst’s bland interiors and conspicuously dead-eyed actors all seem to mask sinister, horrific secrets. The viewers immediate conjecture is everything we see is sexually motivated – we suspect that everyone is sleeping with everyone else and that even charitable acts are motivated by concealed lust. In the opening scene, a maid is discharged from the home where Thymian lives – it seems that she is leaving under some cloud of sexual transgression and shortly thereafter we see that she had committed suicide. The girl that befriends Thymian in the reform school later works with her as a prostitute and, it is suggested, is her lesbian lover. Accordingly, the final scene involving Thymian’s rescue of this woman from the reform school has a sickly subtext of further sexual exploitation. Louise Brooks is the universal object of desire – everyone wants to possess or destroy her. Thymian’s relationship with her uncle is implicitly sexual. Everyone is always casting knowing glances at one another, winking, or rubbing ankles under tables. Pabst instinctively grasps that Thymian’s beauty must be exploited and that the best cinematic strategy is to load the film with memorably grotesque and hideous oppressors. The women in the reform school look like restive sows and the matron moves in a herky-jerky motion like some kind of demented marionette – she is obviously hysterical with sexual repression and in a prison rebellion scene, she yowls like a cat while some kind of rape is inflicted on her by the rioting girls. The reform school’s enforcer is a huge, totally bald man with a curiously child-like face – he is spectacularly monstrous and, in many ways, as impressive a specimen as Brooks, as ugly as she is beautiful. The pharmacist rapist is a slack-mouthed brute and Meta, the new housemaid who beds Thymian’s father and takes over the home, has completely vacant, icy, zombie-like eyes. The faces are neue Sachlichkeit nightmares, horrors as imagined by George Grosz and Otto Dix, but filmed with utter objectivity in the style of the great photographer, August Sanders. (The DVD contains an early sound two-reel comedy called Windy Riley goes to Hollywood; it’s just a curiosity, but a sad one. Louise Brooks plays the ingénue in that film – she is poorly directed, and although beautiful as always, doesn’t seem able to act at all; her voice is over-inflected and she reads her lines amateurishly. The film was directed by Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle under a pseudonym after he was blacklisted in the aftermath of the several trials alleging his manslaughter of Virginia Rappe, the famous wild-party “coke bottle or champagne bottle” incident. The 1931 movie is not funny. Already, Louise Brooks had been relegated to the outer darkness from which she was never to return. She spent years as a New York call girl and, then, retired to Rochester, New York, where she wrote for silent film fan magazines until discovered by Kenneth Tynan in the late sixties. It’s not clear exactly what destroyed Brooks’ chances in Hollywood – perhaps, she was simply too beautiful, too intelligent, and too stubborn to learn how to act in any conventional sense. In her memoir, Brooks mentions being astounded herself at how quickly and catastrophically she fell from glory – she is washed-up by 1931. She recalls Arbuckle sitting in the director’s chair, already “a dead man”, defeated and almost motionless. Brooks had been a professional dancer and what she found most pathetic about Arbuckle in his demise was that he had been, as far as she was concerned, one of the most agile and gifted dancers that she had ever seen.)