Louise Brooks' film centerpiece of 2010 Silent Film Festival

Diary of a Lost Girl, the acclaimed 1929 German silent film starring Louise Brooks, will be the centerpiece at this year’s San Francisco Silent Film Festival.

The Festival, which is celebrating its 15th annual event in July, has announced the schedule for its 4-day summer happening held at the historic Castro Theater in San Francisco. Diary has been designated the Founder’s Pick film for the Festival. Before the screening, SFSFF founders Melissa Chittick and Steve Salmons will be honored with a special award.

Diary of a Lost Girl marks the second collaboration between the great Austrian-born director G.W. Pabst, and the legendary American-born actress. The first collaboration was Pandora’s Box, also from 1929. It is considered one of the great silent films. When their first collaboration was shown at the SFSFF in 2006, it became the only film in the Festival’s now 15 year history to sell out in advance. The Castro Theater, which was built in 1922, holds 1,400 people.

According to the world renowned film historian Kevin Brownlow, the Pabst-Brooks’ collaboration helped establish Brooks as an “actress of brilliance, a luminescent personality and a beauty unparalleled in screen history.” Brownlow, who is the author of the classic 1969 book on the silent film era, The Parade’s Gone By, will be in attendance at this year’s event.

Diary of a Lost Girl tells the story of Thymian, a young woman forced by circumstance into a life of prostitution. The film was based on a book by Margarete Böhme, arguably one of the most widely read German writers of the early 20th century. Though little known today, Böhme’s book was nothing less than a literary sensation when it was first published in 1905. One contemporary scholar has called it “Perhaps the most notorious and certainly the commercially most successful autobiographical narrative of the early twentieth century.”

Böhme’s book was twice made into a silent film. The first, by Richard Oswald, appeared in 1918. Pabst’s 1929 version stars Fritz Rasp as Thymian’s creepy seducer, and the avant-garde dancer Valeska Gert as a sadistic reform school disciplinarian. The tragic Jewish actor Kurt Gerron, who appeared in many European films including The Blue Angel (1930) opposite Marlene Dietrich, also has a role in this second adaption of Böhme’s controversial and contested book.

When Diary of a Lost Girl was first released in Germany, it was subject to both critical scorn and attacks by the censors. For a period, the film was even withdrawn from circulation until cuts were made to its provocative story. Because of poor reviews - and because it was a silent film released at the beginning of the sound era, Diary of a Lost Girl was never shown in the United States until some three decades later. Since the late 1970s, it has been revived with regularity.

The 116-minute version of Diary which will be screened at the SFSFF on July 17 has been mastered from a restoration of the film made by the Cineteca di Bologna with approximately seven minutes of previously censored footage. This 35 mm print is courtesy of KINO International.

The film will be accompanied by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. The musical group, known for their accompaniment to silent films, will debut their original score for Diary. The Colorado-based Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra is a five to seven piece chamber ensemble which recreates the sound of small local orchestras once popular in America. In 2007, Mont Alto accompanied the 1928 Brooks’ film, Beggars of Life, when it played to great acclaim at the SFSFF.

Following this special screening of Diary of a Lost Girl, a book signing will take place at the Castro Theater place which should prove of interest to fans of Brooks. Ira M. Resnick, the author of Starstruck: Vintage Movie Posters from Classic Hollywood (Abbeville), will be signing copies of his new coffee table book. It contains, notably, a number of illustrations of posters and lobby cards of Brooks’ films, including a one-of-a-kind poster for Diary of a Lost Girl for which the author once paid $60,000.

Also signing books following Diary of a Lost Girl will be Hollywood screenwriter Samuel Bernstein, whose Lulu: A Novel, has just been published by Walford Press. The subject of this “non-fiction” novel is Louise Brooks. And as well, there will be a signing for my forthcoming edition of Böhme’s The Diary of a Lost Girl, which is being brought back into print a century after it was first published in English translation in the United States. This new, illustrated edition includes an introduction detailing the history of the book and the films made from it.

For more info: More about this year’s San Francisco Silent Film Festival can be found at http://www.silentfilm.org/ More about Diary of a Lost Girl can be found at its IMDb entry at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0020475/. More about the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra can be found at http://www.mont-alto.com

Thomas Gladysz is a longtime fan of Louise Brooks, so much so he founded the Louise Brooks Society, an internet-based archive and fan club devoted to the legendary silent film star. Gladysz has contributed to books on the actress, organized exhibits, appeared on television, and introduced her films around the country. Recently, he edited and wrote the introduction to the "Louise Brooks edition" of Margarete Böhme's classic novel, The Diary of a Lost Girl.

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