Diary of a Lost Girl

The sheer perversity of G.W.Pabst's Diary of a Lost Girl (1929) is immediately obvious in the film's first ten minutes.  The picture begins abruptly, in media res with a sequence that is shot with such feral intensity that it seems that the reels of the film are out of order -- are we seeing the movies' climax?  A young woman is on her knees begging while a curiously vapid and indifferent woman, the family's housekeeper denounces her.  An elderly matron looks on with a dour expression of complicit horror -- she knows what is going on but is unable to act.  An older man shrinks from the scene of despair -- he also appears complicit and ashamed, both, that he has caused this catastrophe and that he is now powerless to intervene.  Around the margins of the stark, dismal-looking bourgeouis household, a tall leering figure lurches about -- he's shot like the Frankenstein monster.  And, as an apparition in this chaos, a beautiful young girl enters the scene, dressed like a bride wearing a floral crown -- this is Thymian, the heroine of the film played by Louise Brooks.  The girl gazes at the begging woman and the indifferent bystanders.  The big gorilla offers to tell her what is going on, but only if she will meet him in "the pharmacy" at 10:30 that night.  The virgin (this is her
Confirmation Day) casts a sidelong glance at the tall man that is suddenly replete with unconcealed lewd sensuality.  We don't know what has happened or who is sleeping with whom, but it's obvious that these tableaux demonstrate the outcome of some sort of monstrous sexual misdeed that is about to flower into other sexual catastrophes.  Without showing any skin, but merely on the basis of knowing glances, a network of shifting  furtive eye-lines, lascivious expressions, and grotesque posturing, the film exudes a sense of dank, morbid sexuality that is emetic rather than erotic.  Except for Thymian, the characters, without exception seem grossly unattractive.  Louise Brooks embodies the carnal impulse that drives the film and she's extravagantly beautiful, but there is something militant and alarming about her black helmet of bobbed hair and her glittering eyes and her strangely sculpted androgynous body.  Brooks is intensely desirable but frightening -- she embodies the lure of destructive, socially chaotic sexuality.  Everyone in the film is shown as a sexual being, motivated by lust and cruelty -- but only Brooks is desirable (and scary; everyone else is just scary).  What makes the film remarkable is its harsh objectivity that renders sexual desire as something grimly pathological combined with the weird, alarming allure of the heroine, the film's titular "lost girl" who, indeed, has a diary in which she records her erotic crimes.  We don't know what exactly is going on -- the film's frenetic velocity exceeds are ability to process information. The begging woman is next seen a corpse lying on the sidewalk, her expressionless face wet with the water that has drowned her.  The confirmand, Thymian, goes to her assignation in a sinister pharmacy that occupies the ground floor of the large home where the family lives.  Funereal-looking jars, like crematorium urns, line the shelves of the gloomy apothecary's shop.  The Frankenstein-like pharmacy attendant embraces the young girl and she seems to swoon.  In the next shot, we see the family gathered again, the ineffectual old woman's face once more registering resigned horror, the pater familias shrinking away from the confrontation between Thymian and the new housekeeper, Meta, who has blandly replaced the previous drowned governess both in her duties with respect to the young woman and in the master's bed -- it seems assumed as a matter of course that the housekeeper/governess' job includes sleeping with Dad.  There's a cradle in the center of the room and it takes us a few minutes to catch-up with the breakneck pace of the sordid things happening -- Thymian, it turns out, has just delivered a child, the result of her unfortunate liaison with the monstrous pharmacy clerk.  Meta doesn't want any competition in the household -- it's implied that if Thymian stays around, Dad will inevitably get around to having sex with her.  And, so, Thymian's baby is literally sold to a filthy-looking Hebamme (wet nurse) and Thymian herself gets peddled to a vicious dominatrix who runs a home for delinquent girls.  From this point, things get even nastier.  The dominatrix has, as a sidekick, another demented-looking giant, a huge bald thug who pushes the girl's around but seems pre-sexual -- at one point, he slathers red lipstick confiscated from one of the sluts in the reform school all over his full, lascivious lips.  The girls, who all seem to be either retarded or Lesbians or both, have to eat their gruel, a filthy-looking soup to the beat of a metronome -- everything in this home for unwed mothers is done to a militaristic beat, including punitive calisthenics that are led by the dominatrix beating a gong. The remarkable aspect of the film is that Pabst doesn't try to create any empathy with his victims -- everyone is corrupt and deserves what they get.  The girls in the military reform school are all vicious themselves -- a quick pan through the dormitory shows them smoking, drinking, settling down for some Sapphic group sex, or quarreling with one another.  The heroine stirs up a revolt in the home for unwed mothers and the girls like Bacchantes seize the dominatrix and the big bald goon and beat them in time to the gong that one of the girls has seized.  Thymian with a depraved inmate of the reform school flee the institution, ending up, of course, in a high-class brothel.   Here the madam is an immense fat woman who first seems pleasantly compassionate, but who turns out to be a monster of rapacity and exploitation in her own right.  She casts sidelong glances at Thymian, knowing that she'll be a gold mine for the whorehouse and immediately sets out to auction her off to the highest bidder.  A completely feckless nobleman named Osdorrf has now joined Thymian and her guide to the brothel, Ericka.  (Osdorrf is so useless he can't manage to milk a cow -- and Pabst is so perverse that he makes the milking scene into a sequence of utter sexual depravity.)  Thymian thrives as a prostitute.  At an exclusive night-club, she's raffled off to the highest bidder -- Dad is present as well as the monster from the pharmacy; both of them are a little nonplussed when they see Thymian dancing energetically with a huge fat man who looks like something out of the sketchbooks of George Grosz -- but they're not really surprised and don't do anything for her, but slink out of the place.  Meta, who is with them, smirks but she's protective -- she knows that without her imposing some limits on the boys they would be trying to buy Thymian's services as well.  Everything moves with tremendous velocity.  A title informs us that Dad has died.  Thymian goes to the reading of the Will (it's clear that she has some money coming to her from the Estate).  Meta is there with two ugly children (Thymian's half-sisters).  The lurching gorilla from the pharmacy has bought the house and is happily putting Meta out on the street along with her kids.  Thymian decides that she doesn't want her half-sisters to become whores like her and so she impulsively gives her share of the Estate to Meta's kids.  The oddly expressionless and gruesome Meta doesn't so much as thank Thymian for her generosity.  Back at the brothel, Osdorrf demonstrates his disappointment that Thymian, who's been supporting them all anyway with the proceeds of her tricks, hasn't brought home any cash by hurling himself out a window.  He is disconsolate that the plans he has devised for a bigger, better, and more luxurious brothel, can not be realized and, so, he commits suicide.  At his grave, Thymian encounters Count Osdorrf's respectable uncle, a Baron. He agrees to take care of Thymian -- what exactly this means is left ambiguous.  Osdorrf's withered sisters turn out to be benefactors of the repulsive house-of-horrors girl's reform school.  The freshly respectable Thymian attends a meeting of  the nasty female board of directors, insults the matron, and stalks out -- Osdorff humbly follows her remarking nonchalantly:  "If there were more love in the world, no one would be lost."  It's not clear what he means by "more love" since the film hasn't shown any love of any kind whatsoever -- even Thymian's relinquishment of her small fortune to her half-sisters is shown to be a quasi-reflexive and whimsical act of sheer impulse; there's no cognizable emotion behind it except caprice.  When Thymian's infant is sold to wet nurse, it's pretty clear that the baby has been handed-over to someone who's job is to kill the child.  Later, we see Thymian anxiously ascending the steps to the tenement where the sinister wet nurse lives.  She passes a wizened old dwarf hauling a tiny casket down the steps.  Thymian tells the expressionless Hebamme that she wants to see her child.  "Oh, he died," the wet nurse says shutting the door in her face.  Thymian goes down to the street, weeps two crystalline tears into the gutter, and, then, goes about plying her trade as a Berlin whore. 

Pabst is a great director.  Every shot is surprising and the way that the images are edited together is also extraordinary.  The film is brilliantly made, probably one of the greatest exemplars of the sordid Neue Sachlichkeit ("the new objectivity") that reigned in German films at the time.  The grotesque faces assembled for this film rival the work of Fellini -- some of the figures like the fat madam with her pearls, the pharmacy-clerk rapist, the bald man-child in the reform school,  once seen can't be unseen.  The film is so flamboyantly grim and cynical that it achieves a certain gutter poetry-- the picture is clearly an influence on Fassbinder and many of the scenes seem to be templates for sequences that Fassbinder later re-stages in contemporary costume.  (The strange, compromised ending is an imposition by the censors.  Pabst wanted to show Thymian using her legacy to found a particularly fine and elegant brothel, but couldn't get this approved -- nonetheless, he manages to make the relationship between Thymian and the much older Baron Osdorrf as squirm-inducing as possible.)  Of course, any film with Louise Brooks, the siren from rural Kansas, is worth seeing -- she manages to incorporate an inviolate sense of innocence with the utmost in carnal implication.  How she accomplishes this feat is almost impossible to determine.  Pabst worshiped Brooks and films her like a goddess and, of course, was obsessed with the actress.  To fend him off, she had a muscle-man boyfriend with her at all times on the set.  Pabst tried to make her jealous by bringing his current girlfriend to the studio as well -- this was a beautiful and athletic would-be movie star and dancer, Leni Riefenstahl.