Together with Pandora's Box (1928), Diary confirmed Pabst's artistry as one of the great directors of the silent period and established Brooks as an "actress of brilliance, a luminescent personality and a beauty unparalleled in screen history" (Kevin Brownlow, The Parade's Gone By). Brooks, in a delicately restrained performance, plays the naïve daughter of a prosperous pharmacist. Shy and faunlike, the wide-eyed innocent is made pregnant by her father's young assistant. To preserve family honor, she is sent to a repressive reform school from which she eventually escapes. Penniless and homeless, she is directed to a brothel where she becomes liberated and lives for the moment with radiant physical abandon. This Kino on DVD version of Diary of a Lost Girl has been mastered from a new restoration of the film, made by the Bologna Cinematheque, which adds approximately seven minutes of previously censored footage never seen in the United States. An evocative new score has been added by Joseph Turrin.
