Archipiélago Val del Omar

Archipelago Val del Omar. Film series. Museo Reina Sofía. 21 - 31 March 2011

Chema González, head of cultural activities, Museo Reina Sofía: Archipelago Val del Omar was designed to confront the idea of Val del Omar as isolated and present the Granada native as a filmmaker with numerous asynchronous relationships. With the idea of decentralising Val del Omar in mind, we invited specialists from different areas and disciplines.

Session 1. Documentary and social pedagogy. Film-Train and the Pedagogical Missions.

Presented by María García Alonso, anthropologist and professor at UNED: In this session, we wanted to connect the educational effort of the Pedagogical Missions, film models related to social intervention which coincided on an international level with the Russian experience championed by Medvedkin’s Film-Train. He established a film structure that detected places with some type of labour conflict, with the possibility of bringing about revolutions, not only ideological ones but spiritual ones too. He filmed miners when they were asleep during union meetings or drunk.

Lola Hinojosa, film and video archivist, Museo Reina Sofía: They show that ideology and institutional affiliation aren’t incompatible with experimentation and the avant-garde. Filming them and showing them the films. Evidence that could be used against them in court. The goal of the Pedagogical Missions was to create an awareness of nationality out of diversity.

Session 2. Vibration of desire. Cinegraphies and avant-garde, 1935-39.

This session was presented by Jesús González Requena, an unorthodox film historian who entered the field of textual theory as a methodology partway between psychoanalysis, Marxism and iconology.

Cristina Cámara, film and video archivist, Museo Reina Sofía: The session featured two very different films: Rose Hobart by Joseph Cornell and Val del Omar’s Vibración de Granada.

Jesús González Requena: These are two films that very clearly reveal the greatest desire of the two filmmakers.

Chema González: Here surrealism is understood as compulsive beauty, ecstatic movement, the staging of desire – all on the fringes of the deconstructive logic of the avant-gardes.

From the documentary, Val del Omar is making a lyrical plastic immersion into imaginary spaces and Joseph Cornell is building one of his first film collages by appropriating and reediting an existing film. He didn’t even have any relationship with the material in his film.

Session 3. Other primitivisms. Flamenco and the image in movement, 1953-1955.

Presented by Pedro G. Romero, artist, researcher, art historian and curator of the exhibition, La noche española.
The session presents Val del Omar’s two main films, Aguaespejo granadino and Fuego en castilla, Arabesque for Kenneth Anger by Marie Menken and Herbert Matter’s Bailes primitivos flamencos, edited by Vicente Escudero.
In the soundtrack, Escudero snaps his fingers and strikes his knuckles against Berruguete’s sculptures like flamenco players hit the table.
From flamenco and Val del Omar’s roots. They called it the mystical Mecca.
The first piece that Val del Omar started working on after the war was a mystery play using only sounds. With only a soundtrack, he built a theatre piece about the war, Adam and Eve, etc. Strumming sounds, the tapping of fingernails on wooden boxes. It’s the result of Val del Omar’s work with mystery plays and sound. He got the idea of working with recorded sound as a narrative element. For example, I remember a scene where a few drops of water are falling on a zinc drainpipe, repeating over and over to see if any of the sequences sounded like an Andalusian buleria.

Session 4. Cinema as experience: overflows and expansions, 1960-1980.

Presented by Esperanza Collado, a researcher focusing on the dematerialisation of film projection in different countries and experiences.

In the 1940s, Val del Omar talked about a kind of film projected on an endless screen, which would later be called Apanoramic Overflow. Kubelka, VanDerBeek and Val del Omar reached a kind of degree zero with flicker film and Val del Omar was aware that he wanted to reach the body in some way.
There was a close relationship between VanDerBeek’s somewhat visionary and utopian project and Val del Omar’s Overflow and his PLAT – his Picto Luminic Audio Tactile Laboratory. The body was no longer something that the brain had to overcome to reach a total perception of cinema.

Val del Omar and Stan VanDerBeek shared the same view of the educational and transformative power of the vision that this technology had. For example, breaking with unidirectional space also broke with the disappearance of the body in film. I think that the expansion of cinema is one of the many symptoms of its dematerialisation.