Diary of a Lost Girl (MoC 97) (Blu-ray + DVD) (Import)

A masterwork of the German Silent Cinema whose reputation has only increased over time, Diary of a Lost Girl (Tagebuch einer Verlorenen) traces the journey of a young woman from the pit of despair to the moment of personal awakening. Directed with virtuoso flair by the great G. W. Pabst, Diary of a Lost Girl represents the final pairing of the filmmaker with screen icon Louise Brooks, mere months after their first collaboration in the now-legendary Pandoras Box (Die Büchse der Pandora).

Brooks plays Thymiane Henning, an unprepossessing young woman seduced by an unscrupulous and mercenary character employed at her fathers pharmacy (played with gusto by Fritz Rasp, the degenerate villain of such Fritz Lang classics as Metropolis, Spione, and Frau im mond). After Thymiane gives birth to the child and subsequently rejects her familys expectations for marriage, the baby is stripped from her care, and Thymiane is relegated to a purgatorial reform school that functions less as an educational institution and more like a conduit for fulfilling the headmistress's sadistic libidinal fantasies.