The Masters of Cinema Series

G. W. Pabst’s Diary of a Lost Girl and the Miracle of Louise Brooks

by R. Dixon Smith, 2007

“But in Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl we have the miracle of Louise Brooks.” — Lotte H. Eisner

By the mid-1920s, Expressionist films in Germany had largely given way to the spirit of “the new objectivity” — die neue Sachlichkeit — a matter-of-fact probing of psychological and social problems. Fantasy was being replaced by social realism. To quote European intellectual historian Peter Gay:

… by 1925, the German atmosphere was calmer than at any point since the war and revolution; in art as in politics, the time for revolutionary experimentation appeared to be over… . Neue Sachlichkeit was related negatively to cynicism and resignation, positively to the enthusiasm for the immediate reality as a result of the desire to take things entirely objectively. In substance, Neue Sachlichkeit was a search for reality, for stability, after a period of exuberant hopes which had found an outlet in Expressionism… . [1]

This correlation of hard times and wild improvisation in the arts is an important observation, for many of the Neue Sachlichkeit artists were merely sobered and disillusioned former Expressionists. Hence, “New Objectivity” became a label not just for the arts, but for an entire period of conservatism and retrenchment in German society, reflecting — just before the great depression — Germany’s political and economic better times. Many of the “New Objectivity” social-realist films belong to a genre that the Germans call Strassenfilme — “street films” — sordid and commonplace stories of social crisis, disintegration, starvation, and prostitution, the best known of which are Karl Grune’s Die Strasse (The Street, 1923), E. A. Dupont’s Variété (Variety, 1925), and G. W. Pabst’s Die freudlose Gasse (The Joyless Street, 1925), Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney (The Love of Jeanne Ney, 1927), and Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box, 1929).

Before he made Pandora’s Box, films such as Der Schatz (The Treasure, 1923), Geheimnisse einer Seele (Secrets of a Soul, 1926), Abwege (Crisis, 1928), and especially the exhilarating Love of Jeanne Ney made Georg Wilhelm Pabst one of Germany’s most acclaimed directors.

Pandora’s Box was an adaptation of two Frank Wedekind plays, with American actress Louise Brooks, who quit Paramount to make the picture for Nero-Film, starring as Lulu, tragic woman of the streets — cool, dazzling, supremely erotic. The camera loved Louise Brooks more than perhaps anyone else in the history of cinema. Even people who have never seen one of her films recognise her trademark hairstyle, that shiny black helmet that is as copied today as it was almost eighty years ago. As film historian Lotte Eisner put it, Pabst brought out “the erotic power of this singularly ‘earthy being’ endowed with animal beauty, but lacking all moral sense, and doing evil unconsciously.” [2]

After completing Pandora’s Box on 23 November 1928, Brooks returned to America, but six months later rejoined Pabst in Berlin for Tagebuch einer Verlorenen (Diary of a Lost Girl, 1929), the story of another beautiful young woman (Thymian Henning) with problematic morals, who, having been seduced, has an illegitimate child that dies, is sent to a brutal reformatory run on relentlessly regimented, militaristic lines, only to wind up escaping and working in a brothel. The picture went into production on 17 June 1929 and was completed six weeks later, on 26 July. Especially effective are Fritz Rasp as the oily, lecherous Meinert, who seduces Thymian; Andrews Engelmann as the hideous director of the reformatory, whose obscenely bald skull is every bit as frightening as Nosferatu’s; and Valeska Gert as the director’s sadistic, lesbian wife, whose lurid performance in what Brooks always called “the orgasm scene” is both shocking and unforgettable. Such scenes provide as coruscating an attack on Prussian authoritarianism and discipline as Leontine Sagan’s more famous frontal attack in Mädchen in Uniform (Girls in Uniform, 1931).

As for Louise Brooks, Lotte Eisner had this to say:

Pabst’s remarkable evolution must thus be seen as an encounter with an actress who needed no directing, but could move across the screen causing the work of art to be born by her mere presence. Louise Brooks, always enigmatically impassive, overwhelmingly exists throughout these two films. We now know that Louise Brooks is a remarkable actress endowed with uncommon intelligence, and not merely a dazzlingly beautiful woman. [3]

Brooks’ biographer, Barry Paris, argues that the actress was never more erotic than in the bordello scenes, “dancing, drinking champagne, arching her swanlike neck in full sexual submission.” [4] These scenes clearly portray a society in rapid decline.

It was not until the late 1950s that Louise Brooks discovered the cinema of Ingmar Bergman and recognised in his work sexual themes similar to those with which she had been associated while working for G. W. Pabst, a discovery that revealed to her the essence of Pabst’s work:

I think that in the two films Pabst made with me … he was conducting an investigation into his relations with women, with the object of conquering any passion that interfered with his passion for his work. He was not aroused by sexual love, which he dismissed an as enervating myth. It was sexual hate that engrossed his whole being with its flaming reality. [5]

Not surprisingly, the censors had a field day with Diary of a Lost Girl and wielded their cutting shears with a vengeance. Although severely mutilated, the picture was premiered in Vienna on 27 September 1929 at the Gartenbau-Kino, and in Berlin at Ufa’s Kurfürstendamm Theater on 14 October. It was not well received. What killed the film was its timing, for talkies were now widely available, and that’s all audiences wanted. Critics largely ignored it, and what notices it did receive were uniformly negative. Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl were both casualties of the all-talking craze in America as well. Diary of a Lost Girl received no serious critical attention until the 1960s, when the picture was finally restored, as close as possible, to what Pabst had intended audiences to see. Today it is regarded, as is Pandora’s Box, as a late-silent masterwork.

Pabst’s later work — Die weisse Hölle vom Piz Palü (White Hell of Pitz Palu, co-directed with Dr. Arnold Fanck in 1929), Die 3 Groschenoper (The 3 Penny Opera, 1931), and Die Herrin von Atlantis (The Mistress of Atlantis, 1932) — confirmed his status. Westfront 1918 (1930) and Kameradschaft (Comradeship, 1931) are regarded as two of the most powerful anti-war pictures ever made.

The future was less kind to Louise Brooks. Despite an appearance in an early Howard Hawks feature, A Girl in Every Port (1928), she had only managed to make one other major film in Hollywood — William A. Wellman’s gritty road picture, Beggars of Life (1928). After finishing Diary of a Lost Girl, she went to Paris, where, under the tutelage of René Clair, she made one more scintillating screen appearance, in Augusto Genina’s masterfully crafted early talkie, Prix de beauté (Miss Europe) (Beauty Prize, 1930). But Brooksie’s return to Hollywood was far from triumphant. Blacklisted for refusing to overdub dialogue onto her scenes in Paramount’s The Canary Murder Case (directed by Malcolm St. Clair with Frank Tuttle), she found herself reduced to accepting parts in B-westerns. She finally had had enough of the Hollywood studio system, quit the film capital forever, and eventually settled in New York, where she lived in relative obscurity for decades. “Your life is exactly like Lulu’s,” Pabst had told her in Berlin, “and you will end the same way.” [6] She very nearly did, but in March 1956 she moved to Rochester, New York, to be close to the film archive of the George Eastman House. There she made a comeback as a writer, producing a remarkably perceptive series of essays about the film industry in which she once had played, however briefly, such an important role.

ENDNOTES

1 Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: Harper & Row, 1968).

2 Lotte H. Eisner, The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt (London: Thames & Hudson, 1968), p. 296.

3 Ibid.

4 Barry Paris, Louise Brooks (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1990), p. 325.

5 Louise Brooks, Lulu in Hollywood (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), pp. 97-98.

6 Quoted in ibid., p. 105.