Cinema
Diary of a Lost Girl
Das Tagebuch einer Verlorenen
G. W. Pabst · 1929
Synopsis
On the day of her confirmation, Thymian, daughter of the pharmacist Henning, sees the housekeeper driven out of the house, then brought back dead. That same night, Meinert, the employee who runs the pharmacy, assaults her while she is unconscious. The child who is born is put out to a wet nurse, and the family sends Thymian to a reformatory run like a prison. Helped by the young Count Osdorff, she escapes from it with a companion, Erika, learns of her child's death and finds refuge in a brothel.
Context
The film is based on Margarete Böhme's novel of 1905, a great bookshop success, from a screenplay by Rudolf Leonhard, and was produced by Pabst's own company. It is the second of the two films that Pabst made in the same year with the American Louise Brooks. Shown first in Vienna, it was released in Berlin on 15 October 1929. The novel had already been adapted for the cinema, notably by Richard Oswald in 1918.
Who it is for
A silent feature film; depending on the cuts, the known copies run from an hour and twenty minutes to nearly two hours.
Prizes and reception
Selected by Roger Ebert among his great films; sixty-third in the ranking of the hundred German films drawn up by the German film archives in 1994.