G.W. Pabst and the icon-setting silent diva Louise Brooks reteamed after the success of Pandora's Box (1929) to film Diary of a Lost Girl. Young and innocent Thymian Henning (Brooks) is daughter to a pharmacist and grows up in a big house but a series of unpleasant happenings including sexual abuse and pregnancy brought her life into a reform school. She escapes from the school but bad luck awaits her at the doorsteps. She ends up in a brothel and has to survive as a prostitute. The film is an adaptation from a controversial novel by Margarete Böhme which was still very popular at the time and the charisma and sex appeal of Brooks remains a highlight of this film.

The restoration of this film was based on the only three existing nitrate positive prints, all incomplete, coming from the Cinémathèque Française, the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique and the achive of Sodre, in Montevideo. Through this restoration, most of the scenes originally cut by German censors were restored, with a vital brothel scene being re-discovered.

Film print courtesy of the Deutsche Kinemathek - Museum für Film und Fernsehen

4/12*

(Sun)

2:00pm

Cinema, Hong Kong Film Archive

*Post-screening talk with Mary Wong, in Cantonese