Brooksie. The camera has never loved anyone in the same way that it loved Louise Brooks, and it more than likely never will. Sure, there's Setsuko Hara with her girl-next-door appeal, and Antonioni's muse, Monica Vitti. And one can't forget Catherine Deneuve. Damn. Now I've lost my train of thought. Ohhhhhh... Louise Brooks. My point: There's only one Brooksie.
Here's the beguiling Louise Brooks in her first German film with director G.W. Pabst. Their second undertaking would be a little film called Pandora's Box, which I'm holding my breath for in BluRay. In some ways, Diary of a Lost Girl is the better of the two films, but you can be the judge of that. Pandora's Box to follow.
From silentera.com:
With Louise Brooks enshrined as an irrefutable icon of the silent era of films, any home video release of one of her films is news, especially when the film features her last great role and when the film is presented in a fine new edition such as the one at hand. The disc features approximately seven minutes of footage previously unavailable on home video.
This video transfer was prepared from a restoration print prepared by L’Immagine Ritrovata and distributed by Transit Films/Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Stiftung, current controller of many of the German films from the late silent era. The print features a clarity of detail, with broad grayscale ranges featuring detailed highlights and open shadows, that hasn’t been seen before in America in post-release prints of this film. The restoration print still has the usual amount of persistent speckling, dust and moderate print damage in the form of scuffing, lengthy scratches, emulsion chipping and decomposition, splices, timing marks, and sprocket damage in the image area of some sections of the print. The video transfer itself departs from the example of other recent Kino releases in that the digital resolution of the transfer and video bit rate is high enough (with video compression low enough) to replicate the original print’s film grain but without introducing many perceptible digital artifacts. The video bit rate does not fall lower than 5 Mb per second and occasionally hovers up around 8 to 9 Mb per second, rendering a reasonably faithful video representation of the source print.
The musical accompaniment has been composed and performed by Joseph Turrin. The well-composed and pleasing music is a fine example of silent film accompaniment, but it has also been performed on a digital piano and synthesizers which leaves us wishing for true strings and woodwinds in this otherwise good recording.
The video transfer was prepared from a good 16mm reduction print that suffers from contrasty grayscale ranges that result in blasted-out highlights and plugged-up shadows, also from a little print decomposition and a couple of splices. The print’s soundtrack has a high-level of background noise due, we think, to the passable but substandard duplication of the reduction print. While we haven’t seen other home video releases of this title, we suspect that this may be the best-looking edition available.
We are impressed with the image quality of this new home video edition of Louise Brooks’ last great film and recommend it enthusiastically to Brooks fans and silent film collectors alike.
Technical Information:
Title: Diary of a Lost Girl
Year: 1929
Country: Germany
Director: Georg Wilhelm Pabst
Source: DVD5 Eureka Retail DVD
DVD Format: PAL
Container: .ISO+MDS
Size: 3.81 GB
Length: 1:47:07
Programs used: ImgBurn
Resolution: 720x576
Aspect Ratio: 4:3
Video: MPEG2 @ ~4800 kb/s
Frame Rate: 25 fps
Audio: Music Only- Dolby ac3, 48000 Hz @ 192 kb/s
Subtitles: English
Menu: Yes
Video: Untouched
DVD Extras: None
A note to North American downloaders:
All Phillips branded DVD players play European PAL DVD's without a hitch, and it seems like a fair amount of the DVD's we post around here are in PAL, even though we're on your side of the pond. Just a head-up.
(Use JDownloader to automate downloading):
Diary of a Lost Girl Megaupload Links