The Film We Can't See

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BBC Radio 4 Extra

The Film We Can't See Podcast

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Factual: History

The Film We Can See Standard

Adam Zmith listens to some lost sound recordings from 1930.

Adam Zmith has found some lost sound recordings from 1930. As he listens to this archive of intriguing noises, he imagines a film that could have changed the world.

The Film We Can't See: 2. Three Bent Bodies in a Bar One Night

2. Three Bent Bodies in a Bar One Night

BBC Radio 4 Extra - The Film We Can't See, 2. Three Bent Bodies in a Bar One Night

Adam’s old sounds connect three cinema pioneers whose film could have changed the world

Adam goes deeper into the Rio Cinema archives and finds work from filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld and the actor Louise Brooks.

Adam goes deeper into the Rio Cinema archives with researcher So Mayer. They find more work by the pioneering filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld and the extraordinary actor Louise Brooks. Perhaps they were trying to make a radical film together, in 1930?

With help from the historian Jana Funke, Adam learns more about Hirschfeld’s exciting ideas on sex, sexuality and gender. Visiting Aleks Kolkowski in his music room again, he begins to try to date the sound discs. And actor Anton Blake Horowitz helps to reanimate Eisenstein and even his own performing spirit.

As Adam immerses himself more and more into the world of cinema in 1930, he begins to fear that the imagined film never got made due to the rise in fascism. Many films showing queer bodies and expansive ways of living were made in the 1920s and 30s but so many of them were burnt and lost...

Credits
Written, produced and edited by Adam Zmith
With story by So Mayer and Adam Zmith
Starring Anton Blake Horowitz
Music by Courtney Pine
Solo fiddle by Eduardo Lees
Assistant Producers - Tash Walker and Shivani Dave
Researcher - So Mayer
Audio consultant - David Pye
Artwork by Danny Crossley
Production Mentors - Caroline Steel and Andy King
Executive Producers - Khaliq Meer and Leanne Alie
Commissioned for BBC Sounds Audio Lab by Khaliq Meer

Thanks to
Aleks Kolkowski
Jana Funke at the University of Exeter
Andrew Woodyatt and everyone at the Rio Cinema
Peninsula Press
The BFI and the BFI National Archive
Axel Kacoutié
Nikki Meadows

This episode contains the following audio:
Clip of Nazis burning books in 1933 courtesy of British Pathé

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