A Genteel Black Hole

_{Day 4 of Century of Cinema. Also day 46 of Project Glowing Rectangle, in which I try to divert some of my daily doomscrolling time back towards a more nourishing oblong: Cinema.}

Title: Diary of a Lost Girl
Director: G.W. Pabst
Writer: Rudolf Leonhard
Year: 1929
Country: Germany

Format: Blu-ray
Length: 113 minutes
Seen: 23 March 2026
Rewatch

My collection doesn’t have many 1929 films, so today I had just three choices: Talkie comedy (the Marx Brothers’ debut film The Cocoanuts), silent sci-fi (Fritz Lang’s Frau im Mond), or silent drama. In the end, since it was the longest time since my last viewing, I picked the silent drama: Diary of a Lost Girl, directed by G.W. Pabst and starring Louise Brooks.

Thymian (Brooks) is the young, naive daughter of a pharmacist (Josef Rovensky). When her father’s sleazy assistant (Fritz Rasp) gets her pregnant, Thymian is forced to give up her daughter. The family disowns young Thymian, sending her to a reformatory for wayward girls ruled by a sadistic matron (Valeska Gert).

From then on the film is a relentless series of unfortunate events, a misery memoir with precious few joyful moments. Louise Brooks gives an understated, dignified performance that is never less than engaging—she obviously deserves her place in film history, and not just for her iconic style and bewitching beauty. But the film itself is just too grim for my taste. It sparks no joy and will soon be pruned from my collection!