Synopsis
Diary of a Lost Girl (Tagebuch einer Verlorenen, 1929) is a German silent drama you can watch online on iFILM, built around one of the screen's most expressive faces. Louise Brooks, the American with the black bob who became an icon of Weimar cinema, carries nearly every frame.
Thymian, a pharmacist's daughter, is assaulted by her father's clerk, bears a child out of wedlock, and loses it. Her family disowns her and ships her to a reformatory where the discipline is crueler than anything on the street. From there: escape, a brothel, years of being branded "fallen" by people far more compromised than she is. Director G. W. Pabst refuses to lecture — the camera simply watches, and the hypocrisy of respectable society does the rest.
Censors nearly buried it for showing too plainly how bourgeois morality crushes a woman while shielding the men. Today it stands beside Pandora's Box as Brooks' finest work and a high point of late silent film. Anyone who assumes silent movies are quaint or slow should start here. Stream Diary of a Lost Girl (1929) online on iFILM.
Starring
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