A tale of radical sexual freedom contrasted to a vision of pathologically decayed bourgeois morality in Germany of the late Twenties, Diary of a Lost Girl was G.W. Pabst's last silent, and his second masterpiece with American actress Louise Brooks. Even more provocative in subject matter than the first (Pandora's Box), and shot, like Pandora's Box, for the psychological and the ironic angle, Diary of a Lost Girl “displays a new, almost documentary restraint. Pabst now seeks neither Expressionist chiaroscuro nor Impressionistic glitter; and he seems less intoxicated than he was by the beauty of his actress” (Lotte Eisner, in “The Haunted Screen”).
Brooks plays a girl from a hypocritical bourgeois milieu where sexuality explodes only through repressed channels, where family honor takes precedence over integrity, and where, typically, the sexually active woman takes the fall. When she bears a child out of wedlock, the young Thymiane is shunted off to a hideously oppressive home for delinquent girls, and her seducer (assistant to her pharmacist father) kept on. That she finally finds refuge in the genuine compassion of the madam of the bordello to which she flees is perhaps the film's most blatant affirmation of authentic sexuality over duplicity.
Diary of a Lost Girl was ruthlessly attacked by press and censors alike, and Pabst was forced to shoot an alternate ending. In addition, the film suffered merciless cuts after its release. (JB)

Substitution for above 7:30
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• With Clara Bow. (1927, 72 mins, 35mm, Print from Kino International Films)