Diary of a Lost Girl, starring Louise Brooks, screens in Denver

This just in .... 

Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), starring Louise Brooks, will be shown in Denver, Colorado on Sunday, September 14th. This late afternoon screening is one of a number of films being shown as part of the Denver Silent Film Festival. More information about this screening, which will feature live musical accompaniment, can be found HERE.

And here is what the festival has to say about the event. "Louise Brooks was far less than the international phenomenon she became when she first arrived in Germany in 1926  1928 to make the scandalous Pandora’s Box with Pabst. Diary mounted another serious attack on bourgeois German morality with its story of a young girl raped, and sent to a morally rigid “reform school” from which she escapes and eventually works in a brothel before finding a way to rise in social standing."

Musical accompaniment by Rodney Sauer.

Diary of a Lost Girl will be shown at the Sie Film Center, Denver's Only Independent Movie Theater, located at 2510 E. Colfax Ave., Denver, CO 80206

For more information about Diary of a Lost Girl, be sure and visit the Louise Brooks Society filmography page devoted to the film.

Want to learn even more? Back in 2010, the Louise Brooks Society published the "Louise Brooks edition" of Margarete Bohme's The Diary of a Lost Girl, the book the film was based on. It's a sensational read. Order your copy today at amazon.com

The 1929 Louise Brooks film, Diary of a Lost Girl, is based on a controversial and bestselling book first published in Germany in 1905. Though little known today, it was a literary sensation at the beginning of the 20th century. By the end of the 1920s, it had been translated into 14 languages and sold more than 1,200,000 copies - ranking it among the bestselling books of its time.

Was it - as many believed - the real-life diary of a young woman forced by circumstance into a life of prostitution? Or a sensational and clever fake, one of the first novels of its kind? This contested work - a work of unusual historical significance as well as literary sophistication - inspired a sequel, a play, a parody, a score of imitators, and two silent films. The best remembered of these is the oft revived G.W. Pabst film starring Louise Brooks.

This corrected and annotated edition of the original English language translation brought this important book back into print after more than 100 years. It includes an introduction by Thomas Gladysz, Director of the Louise Brooks Society, detailing the book's remarkable history and relationship to the 1929 silent film. This special "Louise Brooks Edition" also includes more than three dozen vintage illustrations.

REVIEWS OF THE LOUISE BROOKS SOCIETY EDITION:

"In today's parlance this would be called a movie tie-in edition, but that seems a rather glib way to describe yet another privately published work that reveals an enormous amount of research and passion." - Leonard Maltin 

"Long relegated to the shadows, Margarete Böhme's 1905 novel, The Diary of a Lost Girl has at last made a triumphant return. In reissuing the rare 1907 English translation of Böhme's German text, Thomas Gladysz makes an important contribution to film history, literature, and, in as much as Böhme told her tale with much detail and background contemporary to the day, sociology and history. He gives us the original novel, his informative introduction, and many beautiful and rare illustrations. This reissue is long overdue, and in all ways it is a volume of uncommon merit." - Richard Buller, author of A Beautiful Fairy Tale: The Life of Actress Lois Moran

"Read today, it's a fascinating time-trip back to another age, and yet remains compelling. As a bonus, Gladysz richly illustrates the text with stills of Brooks from the famous film." - Jack Garner, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle 

"Thomas Gladysz is the leading authority on all matters pertaining to the legendary Louise Brooks. We owe him a debt of gratitude for bringing the groundbreaking novel, The Diary of a Lost Girl, back from obscurity." --Lon Davis, author of Silent Lives

"It was such a pleasure to come upon your well documented and beautifully presented edition." -- Elizabeth Boa, University of Nottingham

 

REVIEWS OF THE ORIGINAL ENGLISH LANGUAGE EDITION:

"The saddest of modern books." - Nelson Evening Mail (1909)

The "poignant story of a great-hearted girl who kept her soul alive amidst all the mire that surrounded her poor body." - Hall Caine (1907)

"There are many readers, however, who find it very shocking, and Mr. Bram Stoker, the advocate of book censoring . . . would ban it promptly." - New York Times (1907)

"The fact that one German critic asserted the impossibility of a woman herself immune from vice having written such a book, is proof that besides truth of matter there was compelling art in Margarete Böhme's book." - Percival Pollard (1909)

"The moral justification of such a publication is to be found in the fact that it shrivels up sentimentality; the weak thing cannot stand and look at such stark degradation." - Manchester Guardian (1907)

THE LEGAL STUFF: The Louise Brooks Society™ blog is authored by Thomas Gladysz, Director of the Louise Brooks Society  (www.pandorasbox.com). Original content copyright © 2025. Further unauthorized use prohibited. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.