José Val del Omar‘s Elementary Triptych of Spain returns to Galicia after touring the world over the last few years in a program that we organized in collaboration with the Val del Omar Archive and with the funding of Acción Cultural Española AC/E. Specifically, it will be shown at the Numax cinemas in Compostela, as part of the Cineuropa festival, next Tuesday, November 19 at 8 pm.
After its presentation at the (S8) XII Mostra Internacional de Cine Periférico in 2021, and its passage through Switzerland (at the VideoEx Zürich 2021 festival ), Germany (at the Feira do Libro de Frankfurt 2022), Mexico (at the Centro cultural de España en Mexico – CCEMX in 2023) and USA (at the Moving Image Museum of New York in 2023), we will celebrate this month the last of the itinerancies of this program, one of the most important in the internationalization of Spanish film culture.
José Val del Omar is an essential and at the same time unusual figure in the history of cinema. Filmmaker with an unmistakable poetic vision, inventor, mystic and visionary. His clairvoyant gaze has been the subject of many studies, publications, exhibitions and retrospectives all over the world, in an unceasing effort to make his work known and preserve it.
In this Triptych, Val del Omar used interventions such as the overflows of the screen and diaphonic sound, patented by the author, which lead to a physical and corporal perception of the image, the so-called tactile-vision. These inventions, among many others, are what Val del Omar called the mechamistics of cinema.
The work of the Granada-born artist thus returns to the land where he filmed the first of the three filmsthat make up the Elemental Triptych of Spain: Acariño Galaico, Fuego en Castilla and Aguaspejo granadino. A special session, which will be presented by the director of the Val del Omar Archive, Piluca Baquero, and which will bring the Cineuropa audience closer to the major work of this filmmaker. A syncretic and esoteric history of the country, in which Sufi philosophy, the flamenco duende, Federico García Lorca, San Juan de la Cruz, San Agustín or Neoplatonism are concentrated. An elemental is for Val del Omar a new form of audiovisual poem, but they are also the three natural essences that constitute each film: the mud in Acariño galaico, the fire in Fuego en Castilla and the water in Aguaespejo granadino.
Tickets are already available at this link. A unique opportunity to see on the big screen the monumental work of this rara avis, a solitary sniper who invented experimental cinema on his own from the different locations of his laboratories.
