José Val del Omar was one of the most significant figures of Spanish avant-garde cinema, a contemporary and comrade of Federico García Lorca, Luis Cernuda, María Zambrano and other figures of the Silver Age of Spanish culture, interrupted by the Civil War, that formed the Generación del 36 (Generation of ’36). He was an accomplished creator -- poet, musician, researcher, inventor and proponent of cinema. He defined by himself as a cinemista, or cinema alchemist.

The Deluxe Limited Edition boxed set VAL DEL OMAR: ELEMENTAL DE ESPAÑA is dedicated to the works of this unique solitary artist José Val del Omar (1904-1982). The collected works of José Val del Omar have been fully remastered for this important digital publication. Extras include numerous photos and essays by Omar that complement his moving image work. Also included is a 44 page bi-lingual printed booklet, in Spanish and English, with an introductory article by Gonzalo Sáenz de Buruaga, detailed credits for each of the films, and comments from the contributing filmmakers.

Jose Val del Omar has often been considered an essential figure of Spanish experimental cinema. However, Val del Omar can be seen as a key figure of international experimental cinema. This is not a minor point, as displacing Val del Omar from a narrow national narrative is a chance to relocate him within an international constellation of referents. He is part of a global history of images and sounds, connecting his works with some key episodes of the history of cinema. He is the bridge between the 1920s avant-garde and the new underground filmmaking of the 1960s.

Val del Omar believed in a total cinema where the viewer was completely involved in the film and which touched all the senses, a kind of tactile vision, an aspect of ”pure cinema” of the French avant-gardists of the 1920s. When Val del Omar was in Paris in 1921, he was greatly impressed by the milieu of the Parisian avant-garde (CINÉMA DADA), where cinema was discussed as a sensory experience. Some of these ideas were born out of the French impressionist cinema that he discovered in Paris in the early 1920s (particularly thanks to Marcel L’Herbier). Just as Germaine Dulac envisioned a “pure cinema” based solely on movement and rhythm, Val del Omar understood cinema as a non-narrative cinematographic experience composed of both visuals and sound.

In the 1930s he was back in Spain, working as a cinematographer, projectionist, and photographer for the “Pedagogical Missions” sponsored by the liberal Spanish Second Republic. This State project aimed to bring culture, and particularly cinema and photography, to rural areas. The Misiones Pedagógicas, made him realize the potential of film to be used as an instrument to spiritually elevate and improve people’s lives, a kind of mysticism, inspired by the Spanish Baroque architectural style. Val del Omar’s works within the Missions already saw his first technical inventions, such as the zoom. He believed in the immense power of film to create unity between all individuals by means of a spiritual ecstasy, a kind of mysticism.

Two images from Val del Omar's FUEGO EN CASTILLA (1958-60)

Over the course of his career, he experimented with various immersive cinema techniques that presaged the development of stereophonic sound, wide-screen processes, 3D, and expanded cinema. During the last years of his life, after the death of his wife, he becomes practically an ascetic. In Madrid he moves to a basement where he builds PLAT: Pictórico-Lumínico- Audio-Tactil, in other words, his lab, the place to put into practice all his filmmaking experiments.

He applied such technical developments in his masterwork ELEMENTARY TRIPTYCH OF SPAIN. Shot between 1953 and the mid-1960s, this film is without a doubt the most ambitious project in Spanish cinema history and one referred to by Amos Vogel in Film as a Subversive Art as “an explosive, cruel work of the deepest passion... nameless terror and anxiety...one of the great unknown works of world cinema.” The triptych is a series of three "elementales" (the name would translate as "elementary"), which Val del Omar proposed as a cinematic genre distinct from the documentary. Parts of the triptych won awards at the Cannes, Bilbao, and Melbourne film festivals in the late '50s and early '60s before disappearing from view for decades.

This boxed set also features a selection of films inspired by Val del Omar. They include Eugeni Bonet's experimental feature THROW YOUR WATCH TO THE WATER (2004), which employs Val del Omar's spectacular late color footage, forming a meditation on time and the landscape of Andalusia, as well as VAL DEL OMAR LABORATORY, a 2010 video made by Javier Viver that documents Val del Omar's technological innovations with extensive footage filmed in his still-existing workshop. The closing sentence of all of Val del Omar’s films, reads “sin fin,” or “without end,” instead of “the end,” underscoring a life that is perpetually dedicated to cinematographic experimentation and invention.

Spanish and Latin American Avant-Garde Film and Animation

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All City Symphony Films Distributed by GME