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8 out of 9 people found the following comment useful :-
Excellent Drama – Earthy, Yet Ultimately Uplifting – With A Fine Performance By Louise Brooks, 14 March 2005
Author: Snow Leopard from Ohio

This excellent drama accomplishes the difficult task of being quite earthy, and often grim, in the ways that it depicts its characters and their lives, yet at the same time being an ultimately uplifting story about the possibilities of human understanding. It also features a fine performance by Louise Brooks. Her performance in "Diary of a Lost Girl" is on a par with that in "Pandora's Box", her other celebrated collaboration with G.W. Pabst.

The story has Brooks as a pharmacist's daughter whose young life is drastically changed by events that she can only dimly understand. From then on, she must endure a variety of trials while gradually learning some important lessons, often with only the barest help from those around her. The role contrasts nicely with her role in "Pandora's Box". Both in that film and in "Diary of a Lost Girl", she has the same level of energy and appeal, but in the former movie, right from the beginning she was very much the catalyst for the other characters' actions, while here she begins as an innocent youth who is completely at the mercy of all of the others, and then grows as the movie proceeds.

The settings are well-chosen so as both to contrast with her character, and to develop it. Her experiences show many aspects of the seamier side of both human nature and human living, and yet this is by no means a mere gratuitous display of sordidness, but rather a growing experience for Brooks's character. It culminates in an uplifting finale that is all the more effective for having arisen from material that is by no means idealistic.

The expressionistic style in the photography, lighting, and sets enhances the atmosphere and also the effectiveness of the story and the characters. The slightly stylized nature of both works quite well, and all of this contributes significantly to the high quality of the movie.

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7 out of 8 people found the following comment useful :-
The modern melodrama was born., 8 August 2005
10/10
Author: dbdumonteil

The melodrama we would love with Stahl's and Sirk's works was born with Pabst .We are far from DW Griffith's "orphans in the storm" !Although implausible,this film has realist accents and Pabst's directing takes our breath away.And what a beautiful last line:"Nobody's lost when there's a little love!"

Melodrama is par excellence a woman's story.An unfairly treated woman.Its construction is parabolic: happiness,downfall,redemption. But "Tagebuch" is much more complex;its first part already features tragedy:Elisabeth's suicide is a sinister omen.

Admirable sequences:

The reformatory where two martinets (a shrew and a terrifying smiling bald man)treat their pupils like dogs.The scene when the girls eat their soup is unforgettable.

The scene at the notary's office where Thymiane returns good for evil ,which climaxes the movie.Pabst uses no (or so few) subtitles : his pictures have the strength of a Chaplin movie.The close-up on Meinert's hand after the girl has refused to shake it,sublimates her redemption.

The final scene when Thymiane meets again her former mate and her final rebellion:"I know the benefits of that house!"

Like very few silent movies,"Tagebuch" can grab today's audience at least as much as "Pandora's box" (aka "Loulou" aka "der büchse der Pandora").Both movies have a very dense screenplay full of twists and unexpected ends -Loulou's death in the former;Thymiane's rebellion in the latter).Both feature Louise Brooks ,who remains an attractive woman even by today's canons when so many silent screen actresses'charm -and actors' - seems outdated nowadays (think of Brigitte Helm -Maria in Lang's masterpiece "Metropolis").Her charisma was so strong that she did not have to speak to move us.That may account for her failure in the talkies.

Do not miss Pabst's anti-war "West front 1918" either.It compares favorably to Milestone's "All quiet on the western front" and Gance's "J'accuse".

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11 out of 16 people found the following comment useful :-
The Diary, 8 November 2005
Author: tedg (tedg@FilmsFolded.com) from Virginia Beach

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

There are two things about this that make it essential viewing. The first is obvious. Louise Brooks fills the camera like no one else in my experience. And like no one else probably could now that movies have filled out all the sensory space they can. And we have come to expect information in those channels.

For instance, can you imagine a movie today just showing people dancing? No story information, no bizarre or comic behavior to amuse us, just people dancing. This has three or four such scenes.

I'll leave it for others to speculate on how such an on screen presence happened to be possible, except to say that much must come from the nuance of the eye, all the things associated with the camera and its context. I pay attention particularly to placement and movement, here not obviously novel but intimate nonetheless.

What a woman! Between she and Clara Bow — these two women alone — we changed.

But the other reason I put this on my "must watch" list is because of the sheer virtuosity of the film-making.

Realize that the hardest thing for a filmmaker is to start. How do you begin? You have to create a world, a feel, a system of mechanics and fate. You have to create a situation with context and characters. You have to have a story with events and pull. All this you need to build in a couple minutes and do it in such a way that the viewer is not only fully familiar and comfortable but swept along, she begs for more.

Pay attention to the first few moments of this. If you haven't seen it dear reader, remember that this is a *silent* movie, that there is no rolling text to tell you what is happening, and there haven't been several months of previews that tell you the whole darn story.

In just a few minutes you learn:

It is christening day for Thymiane (whose name we learn) and as a gift from a live-in aunt she gets the diary from which we know what we see later will be drawn.

We learn that she is the daughter of a successful chemist who lives in an opulent house above the pharmacy. That below lives an assistant chemist who is obsessed by sex. We discover that she has a bossy set of relatives who turn a blind eye to her father's dalliances.

And that one of those dalliances impregnates her governess who then kills herself. Meanwhile, the downstairs chemist has designs on the young girl and makes the first entry in her diary.

The story is off.

I dare say that there is no other movie in existence that conveys this much information so compactly and so directly. The way it is done today is by reference to other movies. You enter today's movies with all sorts of tacit knowledge about other movies that is recalled and activated by codes.

Here, it is all done the old fashioned way, cinematically.

Ted's Evaluation -- 4 of 3: Every cineliterate person should experience this.

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3 out of 3 people found the following comment useful :-
The real "Diary" - now "Lost", 4 November 2006
8/10
Author: melvelvit-1 from NYC suburbs

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

Louise Brooks is luminous in this rather trite tale of a young girl's ruination and regeneration. The plot line founders toward the end but, as a whole, "Diary Of A Lost Girl" is notable for its arresting visuals and set-piece sequences.

Unfortunately, we'll never see G.W. Pabst's original intent:

"The Diary Of A Lost Girl was based on the moralistic novel by Margarete Bohme... But the censors did not miss the point. They butchered Diary more brutally than Pandora. In the ending Pabst intended, Thymiane was to become the proprietress of her own high-class brothel, rejecting respectability in favor of the wealth and power that a rotten bourgeoisie could respect. But the censors insisted that Thymiane embrace precisely the kind of sentimental reformism that Pabst disdained, twisting the film into conformity with German middle-class values. Pabst capitulated because he had to coexist with them and because he would live to fight another day for such subsequent (and better) films as ...The Threepenny Opera... DOALG was a kind of sacrificial lamb, as its scenarist, Rudolf Leonhardt, affirms: 'Pabst's accommodating nature had already made him prepared to make two different endings -for vice, even involuntary vice, must not go rewarded. Where the censors had not forbidden passages beforehand, entire filmed sequences were cut without mercy later on...'"

I love what there is of it (especially the brothel & reformatory scenes), but I was never in the majority:

"But it was death, rather than immortality, that awaited DOALG at the box office upon its release... The influential critic Hans G. Lustig gave it a single withering paragraph in Der Tempel... No serious criticism of DOALG could take place until three decades later...Lost on most critics was the fact that Pabst's technique in DOALG was different from that of Pandora. Lotte Eisner, virtually alone, recognized a new, semi-documentary restraint: 'Pabst now seeks neither Expressionistic chiaroscuro nor Impressionistic glitter; and he seems less intoxicated than he was by the beauty of his actress."

Highly recommended!

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3 out of 3 people found the following comment useful :-
Louise Brooks And Sordid Storyline Keep You Interested, 4 October 2006
8/10
Author: Hal-900 from WA, USA

I was a really looking forward to seeing this production, but I was surprised to see that I was not particularly enamored with it. Pabst's direction is very generic but the material is fascinating enough to grab the viewer's attention. The film tackles a series of adult issues in a bold manner. Rape, pedophilia and prostitution are just a few things the movie handles in a candid way. There are no subtle insinuations here; everything is presented the way it is, without sugarcoating anything. I guess my main, and probably only valid complaint, is that the heroine of the story is such a passive character that I had problems connecting with her. The star of the film is the fascinating Louise Brooks, but her character does not allow her to show any real dramatic range. The camera is in love with Brooks, no doubt about that, but she lacks the fire of someone like Garbo; even Joan Crawford would shredded the movie to pieces with her great magnetism. I'm not sure if it is a narrative problem or an issue related to Brooks's dramatic abilities, but her character is a bit boring. Still, it is an interesting movie.

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2 out of 2 people found the following comment useful :-
An excellent film with one of Louise Brooks best performances, 18 October 2006
10/10
Author: joshh76 (joshh76@hotmail.com) from United States

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

The comments submitted are from Josh76's Dad, Dan47 I found this film to be deeply moving. Louise Brooks portrays the innocent Thymiane with such pathos that I wanted to reach out to the screen and rescue her. Unlike most films from this period there is no rescue in "the nick of time". Events follow an inexorable nightmare pattern as Thymiane, the victim, is condemned to imprisonment after being raped and impregnated by her father's employer. Abandoned financially and emotionally by her selfish father she can only fall into prostitution after she escapes the home for wayward girls. I couldn't help being reminded of "The Magdalene Sisters", another film where girls are blamed for the lustful acts of their attackers and seducers. Louise Brooks expresses more with her eyes then most actors do with paragraphs of dialogue. Even during the giddiest parties in the brothel she expresses desperation, despair and regret with rare subtlety. Despite its' age and the lack of sound the film stands up well. The presentation is not overly sentimentalized, though the enduring "goodness" of the Thymiane and her eventual "redemption" might stretch the imagination. In an age where "human trafficking" is running rampant we could use an actress of such beauty, charisma, and sympathy to portray the continuing plight of girls and women driven into the sordid life of prostitution.

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7 out of 12 people found the following comment useful :-
Pabst/Brooks' best collaboration, 2 September 2003
Author: ac947 from kent ohio

Who would have guessed that these two collaborated in a film superior to Pandora's Box. Pabst and Brooks were a rare combination indeed, and must serve as another decisive exception to the auteur theory. Having just viewed both, I think a case can be made that the Lost Girl film is actually superior to the admittedly better known film. How Krackhaeur could have ignored the value of these two films in his "Caligari to Hitler" book is indeed baffling. The scenes in the "foster" home are fascinating and may indeed say something about the authoritarian mindset of 20s Germany. (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is another good example)

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1 out of 1 people found the following comment useful :-
Diary of a Lost Girl, 2 March 2008
Author: Michael_Elliott from Louisville, KY

Diary of a Lost Girl (1929)

*** (out of 4)

Fairly raw German silent from director G.W. Pabst. A young woman (Louise Brooks) is raped and is eventually thrown out of her house when she has a baby. From here on the girl goes to a reform school, becomes a whore but will she find redemption? I was somewhat letdown by the film since I felt it did have a few flaws. I thought the men characters were really one sided and the second half of the film drags somewhat but there are certainly more positives than negatives. Brooks is terrific in the lead role and does a great job at showing off the virginal younger girl and the eventual sluttish, if mature, older woman. There's a scene where she's working and her father notices her. Within the same scene we see Brooks "slut" slide melt away into that virginal girl we saw at the end of the film in some of the best acting I've seen. The mood and atmosphere is very strong at the start of the film and the morality ending actually works quite nicely.

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1 out of 1 people found the following comment useful :-
wonderful silence, and pace adjusted..., 1 July 2007
9/10
Author: armandcbris from Canada

I stumbled on this flick on a late-night Canadian French channel, and became quite enamoured with it - partly due to the story, the way it unfolded, but more so with Louise Brooks. She looks fantastic, her smile (when it actually appears in this somewhat melodramatic film) so captivating. But even the characters around her were fascinating too, and the way they were filmed.

It seems to me that with current technology, we can watch a silent movie like this now adjusted to what we understand to be a movement of characters to a pace more like our own, not the slightly quickened pace that we're used to seeing in silent films. I haven't seen the film in its original form, so I can't make an accurate assessment as to whether it unspools a bit more quickly simply due to projectors of the era, or the way it was filmed - the point is this: watching a movie such as this Pabst classic now adjusted to a more realistic pace does seem to make one appreciate them more in a strangely contemporary context. Though we still note the differences in clothing and appearance of the people, they all seem more identifiable somehow. But I swear, I spent a few minutes wondering if I had stumbled onto a contemporary silent-film imitation of some type! Oops!

I experienced something similar recently when watching a screening of Murnau's "Sunrise" - the film and its characters somehow transcended their era. Though part of me wonders if that film also had its pacing adjusted technologically, there was a human dimension to it that made me push aside any preconceived notions of silent cinema and just enjoyed it as a tale well told, beautifully filmed, and amazingly acted. This film has the same effect - though I think it was actually I who transcended my era by experiencing it.

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1 out of 1 people found the following comment useful :-
Much Better than Pandora's Box, 24 May 2005
7/10
Author: loza-1

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

In this film, Pabst lets Louise Brooks act in a way that is more suited to the classic silent style. The result is a better film than the much vaunted Pandora's Box. It is ironic that when rock group OMD performed their song "Pandora's Box" on TV (a song dedicated to Miss Brookes) the footage they showed was from this film and not "Pandora's Box!"

It is the story of an orphan who makes a tough journey from children's home to ladyship, whose final scene takes her back to the very children's home she escaped from.

Louise Brooks's performance is much more acceptable in this film, and shows a great degree of film mime ability.

I would also like to single out Andrei Engelmann for the superb performance in the final scene: you never know whether he recognises the lady as one of his escapees.

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