Nora Quintanilla – EFE Agency
The multisensory work of the Spanish experimental filmmaker, photographer and inventor José Val del Omar (1904-1982) arrives for the first time in the United States with a major exhibition that seeks to internationalize the artist’s legacy and which was inaugurated at the Museum of the Moving Image in NY.
“He was a person who did not fit well in what would be technology or science, and neither in purist cinematographic spaces: he was a person in between, a genius like a Renaissance man,” the curator of the sample, Almudena Escobar López, told EFE. in a visit prior to the opening to the general public.
“One of the reasons why it is perhaps not so well known outside of Spanish territory is because of the loneliness of the inventor, and because of the situation during the Franco regime, where there was a lack of communication with the outside world,” he added.
Val del Omar, from Granada, who called himself a “cinemista” (filmmaker and alchemist), was a “total creator” whose work, which uses a language close to video art, is “absolutely modern and continues to be avant-garde,” Piluca said. Baquero, great-niece of the artist and director of the archive that bears his name
THE CINEMA AS A TRANSCENDENTAL EXPERIENCE
“Sensory cinema: Val del Omar’s infinite screen”, as the show is called, delves into his concept of cinema as a transcendental experience through various spaces that follow a chronological and thematic itinerary of his career, marked by a moment of “enlightenment” who lived in 1928, Baquero recounted.
After living for a time in Paris, between the wars, where he soaked up the breeding ground of avant-garde cinema, Val del Omar spent half a year in the Spanish region of Las Alpujarras (south) to “reflect on the mystical meaning of energy” and came back with some of the ideas that would make him a visionary, he added.
Ideas that in his self-taught hands gave rise to technologies such as the variable angle lens, later called “zoom”; the panoramic overflow of the image, which exceeds the limits of the screen; crosstalk sound, which opposes front and rear speakers, and tactilvision, which sought to unite the image and the tactile.
The centerpiece of the exhibition, the result of all this, is “Elementary Triptych of Spain”, the last film project he worked on, until his death, and which includes his three great short films, “Aguaespejo granadino” (1955); Fuego en Castilla (1960), which won an award at Cannes, and “Acariño galaico” (1961), the latter unfinished.
FROM THE SECOND REPUBLIC TO THE “GARDEN OF MACHINES”
His creative beginnings in the Pedagogical Missions of the Second Republic are addressed, to educate the rural population, and his time in Valencia, where he escaped being assassinated by the Franco regime thanks to his technical knowledge; in fact, he ended up collaborating with the government with a “periphonic circuit” of acoustic stations for propaganda purposes.
Val Omar’s ability to invent also encompassed words, Escobar points out, and this is reflected in the names he gave his creations, in technical texts written as poems or in the “collages” he mostly produced in his PLAT laboratory ( Picto-Lumínica-Audio-Táctil) and that reflect his philosophy of “mecamística” (uniting machines and mysticism).
That laboratory, which he called his “garden of machines” and where he spent his last years and his happiest time, was donated to the Reina Sofía Art Center (Madrid) but some of its occupants traveled to New York, such as the bionic optics and the tetraprojector, with which he created images with a dreamlike air.
AN “ENDLESS” LEGACY
Interest in the work of Val del Omar has grown in recent years among young audiences as a result of the work that he inspired by the contemporary artist and musician El Niño de Elche, but it is part of a “Renaissance” era that lives on four decades later. of his death, Baquero said.
“Val del Omar, sin fin”, the nickname by which the filmmaker is known because he ended his films that way instead of the traditional “End”, is also the subject of reflection by four contemporary artists in the show, including the Mexican Colectivo Los Ingrávidos , who recorded an Aztec ball game through obsidian stone.
“Val del Omar does not end only with what he did when he died in 1982, but continues beyond time,” Escobar added.
