Silver Nitrate(24)

“Mmm? Yes. It’s funny, I haven’t spoken about him in a long time. I have a friend, José López, who would tell you that you should never speak of the dead. But then again, you are interested in him, and I seldom have interested guests.”

“You said Ewers stole knowledge. How?”

Urueta rubbed his hands together before taking a sip of brandy. “Ewers was not that different from many men who came before him. His occultist ideas were a mishmash of other ideas. Inspired by people like Krumm-Heller, Ewers thought Aryans were a superior race and therefore endowed with the capacity for spellcasting, but he also thought the Aztec and Inca were capable of such feats. And Mexicans, due to this ancestry, could also achieve a certain level of magic mastery.”

“But Mexicans are not Aztecs any more than all Italians are descendants of Roman generals,” Montserrat said.

“I’m definitely not Aztec,” Tristán said with a shrug. “Both of my grandparents were from Beirut.”

“Ewers’s concepts were, shall we say, a little fantastic. He saw parallels between European runes and Aztec and Maya ideograms and glyphs. His true innovations, the element that made him popular in Mexico in the late fifties, were his mishmashes of ideas about film and magic. Tell me, have either of you heard of Anton LaVey? He was the founder of the Church of Satan.”

“I don’t think LaVey was his real name,” Montserrat said. Since she was friends with Cornelia, she got to hear a bit about the topics that they covered on her show, and LaVey had come up at one point.

“Of course not. Everyone reinvents themselves. Rudolf ‘von’ Sebottendorf was no ‘von,’ either. LaVey was a showman, and so was Ewers. But if you asked him, he’d tell you his affinity for orbiting around movie stars and directors wasn’t so he could get a taste of showbiz: Ewers believed films were magical.”

“Where did he come up with that idea?” Tristán asked. “I know we talk about movie magic, but that’s a stretch.”

“Aleister Crowley, probably one of the most famous occultists that ever lived, organized the Rite of Saturn, a play performed in 1910. Crowley then went on to oversee several other theatrical performances. His idea was to embed ceremonial magic within the play. Certain gestures, certain costumes and symbols, were authentic and used by occultists. Ewers believed that Crowley was on the right track, that magic rites needed to be performed in front of a large audience, whose energies would power the spells being cast. But he didn’t think theater was the right medium for this.”

“Film,” Montserrat said. “A lot more people will see a movie than your average play. I guess they’re more immersive, too.”

Urueta snapped his fingers and nodded enthusiastically. “Exactly! Crowley wanted to induce a state of ecstasy in his audience; Ewers thought they would be better used as a battery. He also thought film had particular properties which intensified magic.”

“Such as?”

“The film was shot with silver nitrate stock because silver is a powerful conduit for spells.”

“In 1961?” Montserrat replied, incredulous. “It was phased out long before that.”

“They were still using nitrocellulose film base in Europe. Franco’s people bought nitrate stock that Kodak was trying to dispose of on the cheap, and Madrid Film used that to shoot flicks. We got ours from the USSR. It was unusual, but then the whole production was unusual. And you should see nitrate film stock when it is screened! The whites look like bleached linen, the blacks are so rich you feel you could bury your hands in that velvet darkness,” Urueta said, his eyes wide with childlike glee. “God, the film looked beautiful.”

Beautiful and liable to burst into flames, Montserrat thought. That’s exactly what had happened at the Cineteca some ten years before. Hundreds of Mexican films had been lost in a fire that had probably been caused when a loose wire made the nitrate film stock in the vaults explode. She’d heard of Moviolas blowing up when the sun’s rays focused on a lens. Nonsense, probably, but scary enough to make you careful around nitrate film.

“It must have been expensive to shoot with an outdated film stock,” Tristán said.

“Not as much as you’d think, and anyway Ewers had a wealthy patron,” Urueta said. For the first time since he had begun talking about the occultist, the old man looked uncomfortable. He shifted in his seat. “But yes, there were expensive choices, and the production schedule was not ideal. The complicated sound mixing meant we would have to spend more time in post-production.”

“How?” Montserrat asked. “Was the film scoring going to be laborious?”

“It wasn’t the music that was the problem, it was the dialogue. Ewers wanted the film dubbed. It would be post-synchronized.”

“Like in Italy? Fellini sometimes didn’t write dialogue until a scene had been shot,” Montserrat said. “Was it an artistic statement? Or was he hoping to sell this to a foreign market and dub into another language?”

“No, it was driven by Ewers’s ideas about magic systems, some bits from Crowley, some bits from God knows where. He thought when the image and sound are shot separately and then brought together, it’s like closing a circuit.”

“Then when you say he stole knowledge…he stole Crowley’s ideas and spliced them with his own?”