Archipelago Val del Omar

Vista de sala de la exposición. Desbordamiento de Val del Omar, 2010 — Archipiélago Val del Omar

Held on 21 mar 2011

Although they span the area between the avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde, the film and audiovisual activities of José Val del Omar have taken place in the territory of myth. Myth as something situated outside of history, that only leads to cult status. A situation that generates attractions or extreme fascinations, but that avoid contrasts and relationships. Archipelago Val del Omar is a film and lecture series that searches for these contrasts, in an attempt to understand the author of Fuego en Castilla in a new singularity, not in terms of isolation and exceptionality, but rather of crossroads and recognition in a history woven of fragments, glimpses and asynchronies.

This exceptionality is one of the characteristics that has most determined the way we comprehend and study the work of José Val del Omar. Behind the amazement at his work, which is often called insular , hide stereotypes about the artist and Spain: an ostracized genius during the times of Franco or a baroque mystic in the realist tradition. This series of films and lectures seeks to challenge such assumptions, presenting Val del Omar as a filmmaker born within the international documentary movements that arose in the 1920s-30s, who identifies with its reform and revolutionary inclinations, who shares the compulsive attraction for beauty and the ecstatic phenomena of surrealism, who understands flamenco as another type of primitivism, transplanted into modernity from its very roots, transforming it in excess, movement and loss of limits, and who, in the end, conceives of the cinematographic mechanism as a collective body and experience in overflow, the opposite of what others call expansion.

Incorporating the gaze of anthropologists, text theorists, art and film historians into each of the sessions, this series attempts to multiply the singular, turning the insular model into an archipelago .

In colaboration with

Filmoteca de Andalucía. Consejería de Cultura. Junta de Andalucía

Curatorship

Cristina Cámara, Lola Hinojosa y Chema González

Participants

María García Alonso is a professor of Anthropology at the UNED, National University of Distance Education. She curated the 2006 exhibition Las Misiones Pedagógicas (1931-36) .
Jesús González Requena is a professor of Audiovisual Communication at Universidad Complutense de Madrid and the author of important studies on the threshold of film, psychoanalysis and text theory.
Pedro G. Romero is an artist, researcher and writer. He contributed to the catalogue :desbordamiento de Val del Omar and curated, with Patricia Molins, the exhibition La noche española (Museo Reina Sofía, 2008)
Esperanza Collado is an independent researcher and programmer. Her doctoral dissertation was on the dematerialization of cinema.

Program

Monday March 21

Session 1. Documentary and Social Pedagogy, 1930-35. Film-Train and the Pedagogical Missions

Presented by: María García Alonso

In the anonymity of collective work, the Pedagogical Missions and the Kinopoezd [Film-Train] experience shared an educational purpose with the aim of producing a series of images and documents that would establish a two-way exchange of knowledge about the other – from urban settings to rural settings and vice versa–, and also of transmitting ideology through the culture and values advocated by the Spanish Republic, in the case of Spain, and by the Bolshevik Revolution, in the Russian context. The lack of declared authorship in the fragments shown does not take away from the prominent role of two specific personalities: Val del Omar in the Missions and Medvedkin in the Film-Train experience. The assumption by both of the didactic and mobilizing function of film is the backbone of their filmographies and writings.

Val del Omar. Misiones Pedagógicas: Estampas 1932, 1932. 35mm film, B/W, no sound, 11'. Courtesy of Instituto Valenciano del Audiovisual y la Cinematografía "Ricardo Muñoz Suay," Valencia.

Chris Marker. The Last Bolshevik, part 1, 1993. Film transferred to video, colour and B/W, original version with Spanish subtitles, 60'. Courtesy of Intermedio, Barcelona.

Monologue by Alekandr Ivanovich Medvedkin, taken from Chris Marker. Le Train en Marche, 1977. Film transferred to video, B/W, original version with Spanish subtitles, 17'. Courtesy of Intermedio, Barcelona.
Thursday March 24

Session 2. Vibration of Desire, 1935-40. Cinegraphies and Avant-Garde

Presented by: Jesús González Requena

Vibración de Granada was made by Val del Omar outside of the Pedagogical Missions. This short film, his most personal work to date, is a portrait of the Alhambra and a look at his city of origin. The film marks a shift towards poetic documentary, the results of which he would later call cinegraphies or elementals. In Rose Hobart, Joseph Cornell re-edits East of Borneo, a 1931 drama directed by George Melford, starring Rose Hobart and Charles Bickford. With this film collage, Cornell subverts the meaning of the original screenplay to create a film with continuous ellipses, where shots lack continuity and there is no narrative line, yet the final result surprises with a new meaning. Cornell and Val del Omar not only share avant-garde film techniques, but also a fixation with desire in the gaze.

Val del Omar. Vibración de Granada, 1934-35. 16mm film, B/W (screened with green filter), no sound, 21'. Courtesy of Archivo María José Val del Omar & Gonzalo Sáenz de Buruaga.

Joseph Cornell. Rose Hobart, 1936-39. 16mm film, B/W with blue tone, sound, 17'25". Courtesy of Light Cone, Paris.
Monday March 28

Session 3. Other Primitivisms, 1953-55. Flamenco and the Image in Movement

Presented by: Pedro G. Romero

In the 1950s, Val del Omar took film experimentation to an extreme, both in technical and formal aspects, as well as content. In terms of formal experimentation, his work is akin to the generation of cinematic poets that emerged post-war in the United States, such as Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, and Marie Menken. This session highlights how the film craft was used as a vehicle for mystical reflection, meditation on representation, and the search for popular roots in the work of the Granada-born artist. This search is also connected to Marie Menken’s film made in the Alhambra, Arabesque for Kenneth Anger. The reflection on representation and the idea of ballet in Fuego en Castilla establishes a dialogue with the film Bailes Primitivos Flamencos, edited by Vicente Escudero, whose finger and nail tapping form part of the soundtrack for Fuego en Castilla.

Val del Omar. Aguaespejo granadino (La gran siguiriya), 1953-55. 35mm film, B/W with green tone, Dolby SR sound, 23'. Courtesy of Archivo María José Val del Omar & Gonzalo Sáenz de Buruaga.

Marie Menken. Arabesque for Kenneth Anger, 1958-61. 16mm film, colour, sound, 4'. Courtesy of Light Cone, Paris.

Val del Omar. Fuego en Castilla (TáctilVisión del páramo del espanto), 1958-60. 35mm film, B/W and colour, Dolby SR sound, 18'. Courtesy of Archivo María José Val del Omar & Gonzalo Sáenz de Buruaga.

Vicente Escudero and Herbert Matter. Bailes primitivos flamencos, 1955. 16mm film transferred to video, B/W, sound, 16'26''. Courtesy of Museo Reina Sofía.