Yambo, mainly known as a writer and an illustrator, is one of the first Italian polygraphs to direct a film (Otello, 1909; see Bernardini, A. 1996a: 359). In 1910, he shot UN MATRIMONIO INTERPLANETARIO, whose subject is probably influenced by La colonia lunare, a science-fiction novel written by Novelli himself; the title of one of the chapters is particularly meaningful: I promessi sposi lunari (The lunar betrothed). This comparative study is the result of the analysis of the cooperation between a man of letters and an illustrator at the beginning of the 20th century. The fictional theme handled in the film belongs to a genre that was and still is rarely dealt with in Italian cinematography. I seek to find the common points linking Yambo's literary, graphical, and cinematographic experiment to the Futurist avant-garde. They will present common elements both from the point of view of the ‘words in freedom’ concept,which finds an extremely rare and animated forerunner in Yambo's film and in the Manifesti, which is dedicated to literature and cinematography.

La colonia lunare

In his novel La colonia lunare (published in 1908) Enrico Novelli merges scientific elements with some adventurous, exotic, and fictional literary trends, both elitist and popular. In La colonia lunare, during a long flashback, the German main character, Otto Schauenburg, tells the story of an amazing accomplishment. The pages of his diary, whose accidental discovery is described in the first pages of the novel, in line with the narrative device adopted by Manzoni, constitute the main block of this work.