Diary of a lost girl = Das Tagebuch einer verlorenen

A melodrama portraying the adventures of an innocent led astray. The heroine (Louise Brooks), seduced by her pharmacist father’s lascivious assistant, bears an illegitimate child. Judged harshly by her family she is sent to a brutally run reformatory, escapes into prostitution and is finally reinstated in society. Based on a popular novel which mixed emancipatory and sentimental elements, Pabst’s film is indeterminately updated. Although presumably set in Weimar Germany there is no attempt to present an historically accurate setting. In conception the reformatory is Prussian, the brothel Victorian. Brooks’s quality of knowing innocence is at its most erotic in the brothel scenes. The film attacks the harshness of bourgeois morality without challenging patriarchy, playing upon the woman’s predicament while maintaining a male perspective. Based on the novel by Marguerite Bohme. With English intertitles.