The Film We Can't See

The sound archive from 1930 is about to be auctioned to mysterious bidders. The sounds are linked to extraordinary film pioneers and an unrealised film that would have changed the world — but today they may be lost again. The Rio Cinema will be forced to give up the archive. Can Adam pitch this to the BBC for a podcast series? Adam assembles So Mayer, Anton Blake Horowitz and m

The creative but awkward dynamic between writer Adam Zmith and actor Anton Blake Horowitz blows up. They are trying to collaborate, but the boundary between creativity and personal experiences breaks. Wounded, Adam hears more about the history of censorship from film archivist So Mayer, who also reveals their own personal motivations for researching film and queer history. Just as

Adam’s investigation into the lost sound archive prompts him to watch Mädchen in Uniform, a lesbian high school dramedy from 1931. He learns all about how the film was nearly lost forever, and its significance today is explained to him by Camilla Baier and Rachel Pronger from Invisible Women, a feminist film collective.Adam also listens to the fourth sound disc - a weird multi-v

Adam travels back in time to Weimar era Berlin, when the American actor Louise Brooks danced through the experimental cinema scene with her sexual chaos in films like Pandora’s Box. Film writer Pamela Hutchinson explains why Brooks was so unique, and why her power endures even though her films were censored and lost. As Louise blew through Berlin, Magnus Hirschfeld was giving con

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, s

When a meandering phone call from a forgotten actor called Anton Blake Horowitz leads Adam Zmith into an old cinema, he rediscovers a box of old sound recordings. They’re labelled Eisenstein Project, possibly after Sergei Eisenstein, pioneer of cinema in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. It’s perfect for Adam, a writer and podcast producer who is looking for a story to work on and

This immersive six-part series takes Adam back to early cinema pioneers Sergei Eisenstein, Louise Brooks and Paul Robeson, in an investigation through time and sound, into our bodies and into our futures. The Film We Can’t See is a fresh perspective on cinema, LGBTQ+ history and the power of sound. Where documentary meets imagination, there may be a film that could change the wor