ithankyou: Playing with fire… Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), BFI Weimar Cinema Season

Tuesday 18 June 2019

Playing with fire… Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), BFI Weimar Cinema Season

Well, this was it, I long ago decided to not watch my DVDs of this film as I wanted to see it first on the big screen and Herr Pabst and Louise Brooks did not disappoint. Diary is not another Pandora’s Box but it is a film that gives Brooks the chance to show her acting range and Pabst the opportunity to focus on her remarkable expression and, yes, the rest of her; perhaps the sexual superpower of the silent era (awarded retrospectively), with a character in search of herself and not a purely natural spirit like Lulu.

After watching Mother Krause and Kuhle Wumpe earlier in the BFI’s Weimar season, this is a more focused and ultimately more politically liberal and mainstream tale although we still have the seemingly obligatory suicides… they needed to do something about those windows and accessibility to dangerous prescription drugs. Pabst's film is certainly part of die neue Sachlichkeit, but it's more polished than those two films but that’s not to say it doesn’t cover the darker side of life. Writer and Brooks/Pabstpert, Pamela Hutchinson, gave a fascinating introduction, quoting the actress in saying they were attempting to show the “flaming reality” of “sexual hatred” and this film does indeed burn right up until a telling last moment.

“I think in the two films Pabst made with me… he was conducting an investigation into his relations with women, with the object if conquering any passion that interfered with his passion for his work…” Louise Brooks

Louise Brooks

The thing that flames the fiercest is of course Louise Brooks and whether she’s playing an ingenue, a reform school girl, prostitute or woman grasping her destiny, performs with grace and an almost casual conviction. Pabst’s camera closes in over and over on her astonishing believability lost as much as his audience in the emotional intelligence as well as the structure of her expression: killing us softly with her smile. One first viewing this film does not have the script or story power of Pandora and yet the performance is all of the same quality: this is It squared.

Pabst may well have been fighting to overcome sexual instinct but he was keen to maximise his new found asset and had it in mind to cast her as Lola Lola in what would become The Blue Angel, but whilst he lost out on the rights to that, he also could never really make a Dietrich out of Brooks who, having burned her Yankee bridges by refusing to overdub The Canary Murder Case, decided Europe wasn’t for her after one more film, Prix de Beauté with Pabst’s script involvement and direction from Augusto Genina, which, along with Beggars of Life, completes an impressive top four from her brief career.

A crown of innocence: Josef Rovensky and LB

Who knows what could have been but, we have what we have and this film added so much delightful substance to my impression of Brooks as an actor proving that Pandora’s Box – which I’ve seen dozens of times – was no one off and that she and her director could almost match it even with subject matter drawn from Margarete Böhme’s sensationalist 1906 novel which dealt with a woman’s fall into prostitution – a story Böhme claimed to be based on truth. All a far cry from a Frank Wedekind play. It’s a simpler story but one that provides an interesting fall and rise for Brooks to contend with. Her character Thymiane is the daughter of a well-to-do pharmacist, Robert Henning (Josef Rovensky) who’s only weaknesses are a fondness for young housekeepers and trusting his assistant Meinert (Fritz Rasp) rather too much.

Brooks later said that Fritz Rasp was one of her more alluring co-stars...

Meinert takes advantage of Thymiane – forcibly - and she gets pregnant. At the same time her father is seducing his latest housekeeper, Meta (Franziska Kinz) with the previous one Elizabeth (Sybille Schmitz, later to star in Vampyr) having already been dismissed. There’s perhaps a line between the two men and their relationships with younger women especially given what is to come for Thymiane and later for Meta…

Thymiane has the baby but refuses, understandably, to marry a man she doesn’t love. The baby is placed into care and the young woman is sent to a reform school as her father is encouraged by Meta who knows her power.

The story takes a dark and more expressionist turn as Thymiane enters a highly disciplined reform school run by a director played by the extraordinary Valeska Gert and her husband, the equally odd Andrews Engelmann. These two create an evil pairing although Gert gives her nastiness an extra twist with her curious enjoyment in watching the girl’s exercise… all I can say is Hedy, you and your pearls may have been beaten to the punch by a couple of years and in the weirdest of ways.

Thymiane escapes the school with her pal Erika (Edith Meinhard) aided by her pal the penniless Count Osdorff (Andre Roanne) who has been disinherited by his Uncle (Arnold Korff) for being a likeable if listless waster. Thymiane discovers that her baby has died and in desperation moves in with Erika at a brothel in sequences that still carry coy intent directly or indirectly. The madam (Marfa Kassatskaya) kits her out in high heels and evening dress and in a moment of transcendence offers the young woman a glass of champagne which she gulps down – a baptism of Bollinger.

Brooks and Edith Meinhard

Soon, after collecting on her first customer, Thymiane lying unhappily in bed as a wad of notes rest next to her… Thymiane advertises herself as a fitness/dance instructor and Brooks herself would return to dance teaching in the thirties and, much later, would turn tricks in New York before finding salvation in writing after rediscovery. Her first customer features a bizarre turn from a weirdly bearded Sig Arno who follows her callisthenics before getting too excited and being shooed away with a lighter wallet.

The “lost girl” has found a new direction and yet things cone to a head when she spots her father and, Meta, now his wife, slumming it in a low-rent night club. Father and daughter are heartbroken but Meta rushes her husband away before any rapprochement is possible. Her father dies in misery and her inheritance offers Thymiane the chance to finally change direction… what would Lulu do? Nothing at all like Thymiane whose character gets the chances denied her more elemental “twin” in an ending I must admit I didn’t see coming at all…

Ultimately, I am amazed that given the intense interest in Brooks ,that Diary gets screened so rarely; it’s a fine companion to Pandora and helps give a more complete picture of the actress; she was no one-hit wonder, just A Wonder and, with Pabst’s help and a very strong supporting cast, made her mark here too.

Thank you, BFI, PH, GWP and LB! There’s still more Pabst to come in June with The Joyless Street (1925) details on the BFI website along with the last few weeks of this splendid Weimar season.