Louise as Thymiane in Diary of a Lost Girl
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Pabst's movie derived from a Margarete Bohme novel about a naive teenager named Thymiane, who is seduced and made pregnant by her father's predatory assistant (Fritz Rasp). When her family disowns her, the girl bears her child alone, moving from reformatory to prison to brothel in rapid succession.
But The Diary of a Lost Girl would meet with an ill-deserved fate-the misfortune of being a late silent film released at a time when sound had passed the novelty stage. Any sub-standard talkie was immediately guaranteed public acceptance and a measure of box office success. The Diary of a Lost Girl was an anomaly, unfairly dismissed and ignored. And, of course, like Pandora's Box, it was heavily censored, passing unappreciated until nearly a half century later. Variety's critic, reviewing from Europe, thought Louise "monotonous" as Thymiane. The Diary of a Lost Girl never surfaced in American cinemas at all. But when the film was re-discovered in the mid-Fifties, the Cinemateque Francaise's Henry Langoise wrote: "Those who have seen her can never forget her. She is the modern actress par excellence because, like the states of antiquity, she is outside of time...she has the naturalness that only primitives retain before the lens...she is the intelligence of the cinematographic process, she is the most perfect incarnation of photogenie; she embodies in herself all that the cinema rediscovered in its last years of silence: complete naturalness and complete simplicity." |
Copyright: McKenna W. Rowe, 1997-2006