Silent Watch: Diary of a Lost Girl (1929)

Watched:  07/12/2024

Format:  Kino Lorber BluRay

Viewing:  First

Director:  Georg Wilhelm Pabst

I'd been meaning to see this movie since about 1999, so no time like the present.  

This was the follow up to Pandora's Box for the actor/ director duo of Louise Brooks and GW Pabst.

There are certainly parallels to the two movies as a seeming innocent is manhandled by fate, society, bad-actors and is beset by innumerable misfortunes.  There's a sort of Tess of the D'Urbervilles-like series of horrendous people doing bad things to our hero, and her enduring as best she can as currents carry her along.

I don't know what people assume about film before their own era - that discussion seems out of scope for this post.  But the silent era was far from squeaky clean in the US, and in Germany, they were certainly pushing boundaries visually, figuring out how to expand the language of cinema and telling stories that were dealing in mature themes.  

sure enough, she's got a diary and lost her train of thought

Diary of a Lost Girl (1929) follows the lead, Thymian Henning (Louise Brooks), over the course of her teens and early adult years.  On the day of her confirmation, Thymian sees her beloved maid fleeing her house and doesn't know why.  Her father has both knocked up the maid and found a new one who has designs on him.  In her emotional state, she is first comforted and then raped by her father's partner.

Nine months later, Thymian gives birth, and the family sends her to a reform school as she won't name the father (I think it's implied her father financially depends on his partner, so throwing him under the bus ruins everyone).  The reform school is run by a creepy, giant of a man and a woman who clearly, literally, gets off on running the girls through drills.  It's sort of the template for women-in-prison/ reform-school exploitation pictures, so it's interesting to see the material treated seriously.*  They also hand the baby over to a Midwife.

With the help of a now-bankrupt young Count and her new friend, Erika, Thymian escapes in what is an all-timer for women-in-prison movies, only to learn her baby has just died.  With nowhere to go, she finds Erika and joins her in working in a brothel.  And that's plenty enough spoilers.

Surprisingly, the film ends with Thymian in a good spot, and with the ability to help a friend after additional tragedy has come her way.  She's shown to have retained a spark of being a very good person, even helping those who wronged her.  

As I said at the top, this is less about Thymian making bad choices but enduring the things that happen to her - which is a few degrees off from Pandora's Box, where Brooks' characters wild nature leads to her downfall - while she is what she is, but she doesn't deserve her fate.  It's almost like a weird fetish to read and watch stories about innocents punished for existing, but it's also maybe the more realistic take, as how much power do we suppose Thymian has at age 14 when she's raped by a an adult?

Thymian seizes power in little ways along the way - leading to her fully flexing at the end of the film.  And this means, like so many silent films, the moral message is said out loud by someone who just learned The Big Lesson before the curtain drops.  (and given the state of modern film discourse, maybe we could use the return of that tradition).    

No doubt, Brooks is great in the movie.  Of course she's gorgeous, but Pabst manages to use the contrast of her pale complexion against the blackness of her hair and eyes to center her in frame and light her up.  For her part, Brooks is buyable in every scene, and you can see the warring notions going on in her head as she bounces from fate to fate.  Most of the other characters play somewhat 2-dimensional roles, an economical choice by Pabst, fulfilling their narrative requirements and not much more, with the slight possibility we see some nuance out of Erika (played by Edith Meinhard, who could give Brooks a run for her money), but she just doesn't have enough screentime to do more than is required to push the story along.

As part of Weimar Germany's exploding art scene and cultural renaissance, it's interesting to see things like sex, homosexuality, casual sexual relations, rape and other factors shown and or heavily implied to the point you can't miss it.  The cultural conservatism that would arrive with the Nazi rise to power just four years later is worthy of note for Americans in 2024.

These movies are a major part of European film history, and it's interesting to see how many countries and people were involved in the restoration of this film, pulling from prints from all around the world and cobbling together funding for the work.  In the US only UCLA and a few other institutes tend to feel this sense of responsibility to their own cultural heritage - enough so that silent(!) films receive some public funding and support.

Like most people, I haven't seen much of Pabst's output, but I think I get what he was looking for.  The movie is touching on the cultural and class hypocrisy of the bourgeoise - something Americans certainly explored up until the early 21st Century.  But the downfall of an innocent thanks to the rigidity and nonsense of how gender plays a part in who gets to make mistakes and have their way is fascinating stuff, and while it's been sublimated in this era, it's certainly still a factor in everyday life (and like to continue).  

I also think, like, Hitchcock, dude was working through his feelings about women on screen.  Our man clearly has a thing for girls doing calisthenics and would have loved the 1980's brief spate of jazzercise movies.  This is a sexy, occasionally horny movie for a movie about very bad things happening to good people. But if the ending is any indication, Pabst sure is in favor of letting people be as free as they want.  The movie is not a warning to young women, it's an indictment of the f'd up world young women live in.

 

*which does happen!  1955's Women's Prison is great, while also using all the tropes you're used to