I tour the exhibition of José Val del Omar (1904-1982) in the C3A of Córdoba like someone looking to see the map of constellations in the night sky. There are some works that he identified easily and others that are clusters of star nebulae and dark galaxies. There are no fixed patterns in this almost tactile vision of the artist’s palpable night and his cinematic freedom also flies at the speed of light. The same thing happens to him, he used to write, to the one who burns, and the one who burns is the one he loves. There are loves that cross in this interstellar composition. Its curator, Lluís Alexandre Casanovas, with the help of Piluca Val del Omar, has carefully woven the details of this presentation, the largest since the retrospective that the Reina Sofía Museum dedicated to him in 2011. In his view of the artist there is a complete thesis and years of research on the filmmaker. Also an interest in delving deeper into this unclassifiable character, slippery even in nicknames, who for years has been the strange one, the extraterritorial one, the Robinson one, the outsider. Or the cinematist, as he preferred to be called, in addition to being an inventor, theorist, poet and technical experimenter. The one who managed to reconcile contradictions like no one else and illuminate an entire genealogy of artists, creators and thinking minds.
Contributes a lot of unpublished material. One of them takes us to 1963, to the commission made by the Ministry of Information and Tourism, with Manuel Fraga Iribarne at the helm, regarding the Festivals de España campaign, a cultural program that combined folklore full of stereotypes with literary, artistic, dance and theater. The objective was to encourage domestic and foreign tourism—also whitewash the regime internationally—with the idea of projecting it as a tourist attraction in the Spanish Pavilion at the Universal Exhibition in New York in 1964. After several years with it in my hands—“I killed myself.” working”, it appears written in his own handwriting in one of the documents, “Val del Omar made 10 pieces that function as an x-ray of that Spain that was still developing, but that had little to adjust to the ministry’s guidelines because it was never finished. There is a flamenco festival, yes. But also passersby, tourists or cats wandering aimlessly. The idea of the local is built between those who live there and those who are passing through. A propaganda material, but also transgressive and avant-garde that, after decades hidden, we see here for the first time.
It seems that Val del Omar did what he wanted when he wanted, regardless of assignments and missions. He joined the Pedagogical Missions in 1932, and this exhibition also stops there. In this cultural initiative of the Second Republic, Val del Omar played multiple roles, including film projectionist, documentary photographer, and head of the Museo del Pueblo. His didactic vocation will lead him to demand a “kinesthetic pedagogy” aimed at revitalizing the value of the living and the tactile, which he will multiply years later, both during the Franco regime and in the years of the democratic transition, trying to sensitize the political authorities of that was at stake at the beginning of the constitution of that universe that would end up being called audiovisual. Or “expanded cinema”, more recently.
An example of this is his most relevant legacy, Elemental triptych of Spain, which is also included here and includes three works. Granada mirrorwater (1953-1955) portrays the Romani community as the authentic inhabitants of the Alhambra, whose sources even replicate their way of dancing. Fire in Castile (1957-1960) explores Castilian baroque sculpture through the audiovisual activation of pieces from the National Museum of Sculpture of Valladolid. and the unfinished Galician acariño (1961) approaches Galician culture from the mud that appears in the film from different strata. The dialogue in these 20-minute short films is intense and reveals how Val del Omar’s work cannot be understood without taking into account some lines of force that have historically crossed Spanish art. There are the Holy Week steps, the Spanish religious theater, the bulls, the baroque sculpture, the Don Juan Tenorio of Zorrilla or the seguiriya. Its objective? “Excite Spanish depth,” he said. That is: stimulate surprise, amazement, enthusiasm.
From that Spanish meridian from which he speaks, the exhibition becomes a period document to understand what cinema is as a “total spectacle.” That magic lantern that trembles, lights up and dazzles. For Val del Omar, a mission with a social, educational, experimental, poetic and mystical purpose. His cinema does nothing more than speculate on what makes a context that continually escapes continuity unique. That is his greatest virtue: being a free verse and narrating the world from that “freedom from above”, in the mouth of García Lorca, which he brought to quintessence with the PLAT Laboratory already in the seventies. A freedom with which he also invented a new grammar. Black and white as an abstract color. Approximate instead of approximating. Pulsating lighting, acoustic touch and spherical envelopment.
More than emoting, he was interested in shocking, that is, altering emotions. That utopia of his of “touching with the eyes” to catch “the pulse of the action.” Val del Omar was not so interested in what we see as in what we do not see. And, above all, the way in which what we see gives us information about what we do not see. The screams in the background, the monotonous noises of the water, the unconscious movements of figurative spectators. The night more than the night. In the filmmaker’s text that gives the exhibition its title, A Technique with a capital T, I find a phrase that defines almost everything: “The shortest path among men passes through the stars.”
‘Val del Omar. A Technique with a capital T’. C3A. Cordova. Until September 1st.
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