Diary of a Lost Girl

Directed by G.W. Pabst
Screenplay by Rudolf Leonhardt
From the Novel by Margarethe Bohme
Starring Louise Brooks

Dairy of a Lost Girl is an odd film. A silent film out of the great German silent era, it is supposed to be a drama about Thymain Henning, a young women struggling to make her way in life after being disowned by her Pharmacist father. However, there are elements in the film that take away from the drama and drag the film down.

The strong point of this film is the characters, at least they are defined and strong.


Overall though the script and story are thin, barely enough to carry a film of 113 minutes in length. After the character of Thymain (Louise Brooks) has a child out of wedlock and is disowned by her father, she is sent to a reformatory.

It is this thirty minute chunk at the reformatory that the film isn’t just lost, but destroyed. The acting is overwrought and terrible, everything is robotic and monotonous and it slows down the pacing and plot of an otherwise already slow drama.

I get what Pabst was going for – to show reformatories as stifling in nature – but it could have been done a lot better.

Dairy of a Lost Girl never recovers from this point on, in fact it seems to try too hard to get to the end.

Pabst employs a number of different techniques to this film, but none seem to work. Indeed there are moments that seem like they were intended to be comedic, but fall flat and are out of place.

Dairy of a Lost Girl has a lot in common with its main character: Lost, unsure of itself and at best hoping to be a good film.

FINAL THOUGHTS
This is supposed to be a classic of the German Silent era (my favorite era in film), but isn’t. It doesn’t rank against the best of that era, and by itself it is barely average at best.

RATING: 5