11 Dec Diary of a Lost Girl (1929)

The Diary

There are two things about this that make it essential viewing. The first is obvious. Louise Brooks fills the camera like no one else in my experience. And like no one else probably could now that movies have filled out all the sensory space they can. And we have come to expect information in those channels.

For instance, can you imagine a movie today just showing people dancing? No story information, no bizarre or comic behavior to amuse us, just people dancing. This has three or four such scenes.

I’ll leave it for others to speculate on how such an on screen presence happened to be possible, except to say that much must come from the nuance of the eye, all the things associated with the camera and its context. I pay attention particularly to placement and movement, here not obviously novel but intimate nonetheless.

What a woman! Between she and Clara Bow — these two women alone — we changed.

But the other reason I put this on my “must watch” list is because of the sheer virtuosity of the film-making.

Realise that the hardest thing for a filmmaker is to start. How do you begin? You have to create a world, a feel, a system of mechanics and fate. You have to create a situation with context and characters. You have to have a story with events and pull. All this you need to build in a couple minutes and do it in such a way that the viewer is not only fully familiar and comfortable but swept along, she begs for more.

Pay attention to the first few moments of this. If you haven’t seen it dear reader, remember that this is a silent movie, that there is no rolling text to tell you what is happening, and there haven’t been several months of previews that tell you the whole darn story.

In just a few minutes you learn:

It is christening day for Thymiane (whose name we learn) and as a gift from a live-in aunt she gets the diary from which we know what we see later will be drawn.

We learn that she is the daughter of a successful chemist who lives in an opulent house above the pharmacy. That below lives an assistant chemist who is obsessed by sex. We discover that she has a bossy set of relatives who turn a blind eye to her father’s dalliances.

And that one of those dalliances impregnates her governess who then kills herself. Meanwhile, the downstairs chemist has designs on the young girl and makes the first entry in her diary.

The story is off.

I dare say that there is no other movie in existence that conveys this much information so compactly and so directly. The way it is done today is by reference to other movies. You enter today’s movies with all sorts of tacit knowledge about other movies that is recalled and activated by codes.

Here, it is all done the old fashioned way, cinematically.

Posted in 2005

Ted’s Evaluation — 4 of 3: Every cineliterate person should experience this.

IMDB