sense of what it might have looked like . A few years ago, in the next to last number of the magazine Vuelta, critic Guillermo Sheridan went to great lengths to prove, through literary speculations (given the lack of visual evidence, the study of Amero's films is more textual than anything else), the similarities between the script by Owen for Río sin tacto and by Lorca for Viaje a la luna, to the point of affirming that " both worked on the script for Am ero's film, although maybe without knowing it.'" It is true that each script includes references to the moon, perhaps-as several scholars have suggested- inspired by Coney Island's Luna Park (also a source for painter Joseph Stella as well as Luis Cardoza y Aragón, whose first book of poems, published in 1923, was called- with an interesting photographic allusionLuna Park: Instantáneas del siglo 20) . But the moon also would have been an almost obligatory reference for any young and romantic filmmaker at the time, not least beca use of the historical antecedent of Georges Mélies' Le Voyage dans la lune (1902). Sheridan also assumes that Amero made just one film after 777 (one with a script by Owen extensively modified by Lorca). It is just as likely that Amero was engaged on several projects at the same time: once you get a camera, all your poet friends suddenly become eager scriptwriters. Mérida curiously referred to Amero's third film as Despedida (or Farewell, the title of a poem by Lorca from the early 1920s): as he attributed the plot to Federico Garda Lorca, it is fairly cer-
tain he was referring here to Viaje a la luna. Amero met Lorca in New York in 1928, through Rivas Mercado. According to Amero, Lorca saw 777 and got inspired: he wrote his script in Amero's apartment, working on it for a few hours over a two day period : " Go ahead, see what you can do with this, maybe something will come of it"'s. (This memory suggests something that scholars can forget: great poets do not always think everything they write is great literature.) Although packed with obscure symbols, in the film, Amero remembered, "Lorca tried to describe parts of New York as he saw it.'" In the early 1930s, back in Mexico, Amero finally began to film Lorca's script. Until relatively recently there was no definitive proof of th is first version of Viaje a la luna; in an interview with Richard Diers in the 1960s, Amero recalled that the filming had taken place in Mexico in 1936, after Lorca's assassination, " as a protest against his death," and that they had only gotten halfway done when they were forced to quit (probably for lack of funds) . But here Amero is mistaken: since he returned to New York in 1934, the filming must have taken place earlier, probably in 1930 or 1931. The only direct visual evidence that I have found relating to any of Amero's films is a group of three photographs, the work of Lola and/or Manuel Álvarez Bravo. '· These images document that at least a couple of the seventy-two scenes in the script were actually transforrned into cinema. The events take place on some rooftop in Mexico City. Two of the photos show a
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set clearly based on the first scene of Lorca's script: " White bed against a gray wall. On the sheets appear a ballet of numbers thirteen and twenty two. From only two there begin to appear more until they cover the bed like tiny ants." The shadow of an arm seen against the wall in the background may allude to the second scene: "An invisible hand yanks the sheets." Here, according to one critic, "it is as if the hand that pulls the bed sheets was drawing aside a curtain-or lifting the curtain from a stage-to signal the place where what follows will unfold ." " In a "close-up" of this same "installation" appear the same cards with the numbers thirteen and twenty two (printed with old fashioned wooden type) next to two shoes, one a man's, the other a woman 's. Perhaps we have here a still loosely related to the third scene ( " Large feet run quickly with exaggerated black and white argyle socks") but more likely, this is just a bizarre still-life with dreamlike elements, more the vision of the photographer who preserved the arrangement of props than of the filmmaker directing the action . In a third photograph, surely taken on the same day (the same rug, the same numbered cards appear he re), a group of young men and women pose around the movie camera, sitting on a tripod by its case. The men are seated, relaxed, and include the sculptors Federico Canessi (second from left) and Federico Marín (in coat and ti e), Emilio Amero (wearing a beret), and Manuel Álvarez Bravo (behind Marín). Two unidentified women stand in the background, framing the roughly symmetrical