Product Details

• Actors: Louise Brooks, André Roanne, Josef Rovenský, Fritz Rasp, Vera Pawlowa
• Format: Black & White, Original recording reissued, Original recording remastered, Silent, NTSC
• Language: English
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Kino Video
• VHS Release Date: November 13, 2001
• Run Time: 116 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B000006PE1
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #263,460 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Together with Pandora's Box (1928), Diary confirmed Pabst's artistry as one of the great directors of the silent period and established Brooks as an "actress of brilliance, a luminescent personality and a beauty unparalleled in screen history" (Kevin Brownlow, The Parade's Gone By). Brooks, in a delicately restrained performance, plays the naïve daughter of a prosperous pharmacist. Shy and faunlike, the wide-eyed innocent is made pregnant by her father's young assistant. To preserve family honor, she is sent to a repressive reform school from which she eventually escapes. Penniless and homeless, she is directed to a brothel where she becomes liberated and lives for the moment with radiant physical abandon. This Kino on DVD version of Diary of a Lost Girl has been mastered from a new restoration of the film, made by the Bologna Cinematheque, which adds approximately seven minutes of previously censored footage never seen in the United States. An evocative new score has been added by Joseph Turrin.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Actually Pabst's best vehicle for the lovely Louise, August 5, 2000

By 

L. Peyronnin "liquidlen" (Phoenix, AZ United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Diary of a Lost Girl [VHS] (VHS Tape)

This film, made after the highly provacative "Pandora's Box" is somehow sweeter, more tranquile and contemplative in its depiction of a young girl who's lost herself down the wrong tracks. Louise Brooks is at her most beautiful here- I wonder what Pabst was thinking when he planned this film after the release (as in a venting of sexual violence, guilt and idolatry; not the film's release to cinemas) of Pandora's Box. Here Louise plays the victim throughout- not the femme fatale who must die in her own trap in Pandora. Her character- a fine, delicate spirit who must inhabit sorrowfully the vile places of the professional woman companion and hang with the vile men who frequent those places- is possibly the most compelling heroine of the whole silent era.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Young woman copes with all the horrors life throws at her, April 8, 1999

By 

[e-mail] (Preston, United Kingdom) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Diary of a Lost Girl [VHS] (VHS Tape)

Following the classic "Pandora's Box", Louise Brooks once again plays a character that is more than a match for her men. Just about every experience a woman can go through in life happens to young Thyamine - rape, birth, death, slavery, prostitution. But she never loses her belief in her own moral strength and superiority and is ultimately trimuphiant.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars stirring tale of sex and tragedy, April 25, 2000

By 

[e-mail] (Heilbronn,Deutschland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Diary of a Lost Girl [VHS] (VHS Tape)

Louise Brooks in her most challenging part. Innocently pushed in a world of sin and decadence, Miss Brooks gives the peformance of her life. The movie has everything ,all the clichees from orphanage to brothel,but plays with them in a most becoming and ironical way. Nothing is taken to seriously,every other character besides Louise Brooks is played in an almost hysterical and over the top style,but this only more is a testament of Louise Brooks great and very convincing performance.Go and see for yourself