Poet, musician, inventor, and filmmaker José Val del Omar (1904–82) described himself as a “cinemista” or cinema alchemist, who developed several audio and visual devices such as variable-angle lenses, new sound systems, and concave screens among many other experiments. He discovered his vocation in cinema after a stay in Paris in 1921. In 1925 he made En un rincón de Andalucía (In a Corner of Andalusia), a feature-length film that he subsequently destroyed, considering it an artistic failure. During the Second Spanish Republic, he became involved in the film scene and in progressive educational circles in Madrid. Between 1932 and 1936, Val del Omar was active in various branches of the Spanish Republic’s so-called Pedagogic Missions, which aimed to bring culture, and particularly cinema and photography, to rural areas. In this context, he made a large number of documentaries—more than 40, according to some sources—of which only a few have survived.
One of these films is Vibracion de Granada, an idiosyncratic portrait of Granada that avoids the typical motifs of the city symphony: crowds, industrial labor, motorized traffic, et cetera. Instead, the film opens with shots of the Alhambra, a moving camera scanning its walls, sculptural reliefs, and its lush gardens with trees, flowers, water works, and fountains. Val del Omar’s cinematic fascination for water brings Joris Ivens’s Regen (1929) and Henri Storck’s Images d’Ostende (1929) to mind—both city symphonies that focus on the rhythmic and optical qualities of water surfaces as preeminent cinematic subjects. In addition, like Ivens and Storck, Val del Omar highlights natural elements within the built environment, favoring a highly sensual and tactile form of cinema. The second part of the film shows us details of the city: walls, windows, hatches, patios, roof tiles, balconies, grates, the bottom of a closing door as well as signs, graffiti, a cat, a sleeping woman, and an enigmatic shot of a burning house. Gradually, the film uses more and more longer shots, giving us a better view on the environment with shots of shop windows, children, blacksmiths, a loom, a woman doing needlework, and a market—through a bird cage, we can see some pedestrians. Val del Omar’s approach is dreamlike and poetic, emphasized by non-descriptive intertitles, the use of a green-colored filter, an impressionist sensibility for fleeting surfaces, and a predilection for spatial disorientation, which would mark many of his later films.
Steven Jacobs
further reading
Val del Omar: Overflow (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 2011).
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