Diary of A Lost Girl on #ThursdayTimeMachine

Here we've got one of the classic erotic films of the silent age:

Diary of a Lost Girl (1929)

Diary of a Lost Girl, a silent film directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst and starring the American silent star Louise Brooks was released in September 1929. It was the second film version of the Margarethe Bohme's novel "The Diary of a Lost Girl".

Margarete Böhme

Interestingly, the first one was performed in 1918 by Erna Morena, an actress who a year earlier had starred in "Lulu", an adaptation of Frank Wedekind's work.

Erna Morena

These two titles, with "Crisis" (1928), make up what is known as the "erotic trilogy" of Pabst, which may give a hint of the problems of censorship and distribution for both films.

Louise Brooks (born in Kansas, 1906), was an American dancer and actress, noted for popularizing the bobbed haircut. By her own admission, Brooks was a sexually liberated woman, not afraid to experiment, even posing fully nude for art photography. She admitted to some lesbian dalliances, including a one-night stand with Greta Garbo. Despite all this, she considered herself neither lesbian nor bisexual. In her own words:

All my life it has been fun for me.
When I am dead, I believe that film writers will fasten on the story that I am a lesbian... I have done lots to make it believable. All my women friends have been lesbians. But that is one point upon which I agree positively with Christopher Isherwood: There is no such thing as bisexuality. Ordinary people, although they may accommodate themselves, for reasons of whoring or marriage, are one-sexed. Out of curiosity, I had two affairs with girls – they did nothing for me. (Paris, Barry – Louise Brooks)

Plot: Thymiane is a beautiful young girl who is not having a storybook life. Her governess, Elizabeth, is thrown out of her home when she is pregnant, only to be later found drown. That same day, her father already has a new governess named Meta. Meinert, downstairs druggist, takes advance of her and gets Thymiane pregnant. When she refuses to marry, her baby is taken from her and she is put into a strict girls reform school. When Count Osdorff is unable to get the family to take her back, he waits for her to escape. She escapes with a friend and the friend goes with the Count while she goes to see her baby. Thymiane finds that her baby is dead, and the Count has put both girls up at a brothel. When her father dies, Thymiane marries the Count and becomes a Countess, but her past and her hatred of Meta will come back to her.