2. Three Bent Bodies in a Bar One Night

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

And quotes from: A Statement by S. M. Eisenstein, V. I. Pudomn, and G. V. Alexandrov, Close Up magazine, 1928 Sergei Eisenstein’s letter to Magnus Hirschfeld, reprinted in The Flying Carpet: Studies on Eisenstein and Russian Cinema in Honor of Naum Kleiman, edited by Joan Neuberger and Antonio Somaini, Éditions Mimésis, 2017