Paquito
17th July 2002, 18:25
22nd May, 1997
Val del Omar
Conference in the charge of Victoria Fonseca (Director of The Filmotheque of Andalusia)
Program
TrĂ*ptico elemental de España
Aguaespejo Granadino( 1953-1955, B/W, 23 min )
Fuego en Castilla (1958-1960, B/N i color, 17 min)
Acariño galaico (De barro) (1961, 1981-82, 1995, B/W, 24 min)
Val del Omar, renaissance
My father, JosĂ© Val del Omar, was born in Granada in 1904. He always felt deeply Andalusian and most exactly from Granada, "the meeting point between Eastern and Western Civilisations" as he usually quoted. In 1930, when he married MarĂ*a Luisa Santos, they went to a house in front of the Alhambra, actually the house-museum of Manuel de Falla. By means of papers and conversations with friends and relatives, he settled in Granada when he was twenty and had just arrived from Paris, making a business with Buick automobiles.
By that time he had bought a camera that he used to film his first movie, "En un rincĂłn de AndalucĂ*a" (which he produced, scripted, directed an photographed himself). The ambition of total authory will be with him for the rest of his days. This early filmic adventure was not going to express what he wanted, this fact making him move to Las Alpujarras to meditate. During half a year he was going to reflect on the mystic sense of the energy, on the matter and on the others. When somebody approached to him, he showed a magnifying glass and a magnet: those who were affected by the optic tool were called "Western"; the ones who chose the second object he considered them as "Eastern". Magnifying glasses and magnets were always in his pockets, laboratories and machines. He thought he was going to integrate both tools: analytic ability with emotive attraction.
His first techniques were spawned from those integral experiences. In 1928, the filmmaker Florián Rey, within the seminar Pantalla, spread as a headline "A Spanish lad invents two items that will cause a revolution in the art of the cinema". These were the variable angle lens and the non-panoramic concave screen. The first one, nowadays called "zoom", was patented by Zoomar company two years after. My father invented motivated by a expressive need: he wanted to film the Albayzin from the Alhambra. He wanted to approach to its houses and its people. The technique was the only possibility to surpass the physical limitations.
Those early inventions that, just like Leonardo, he intuited and made to satisfy his expressive demands precede a life full of ideas, images and projects that flowed for more than fifty years.
Filmmakers and artists of his generation for the most part had considered Val del Omar a scientific that was out of reach; for young technologists he was an untranslatable poet. He was never going to believe in the supposed dicotomy between Art and Technology. He was not a one-dimension man but a technician that communicated through art and an artist that generated new techniques to develop his expressivity. A German critic was going to proclaim his genius during the presentation of the film Aguasespejo Granadino at the Berlin Festival, describing him as "the Schönberg of the camera" and the discoverer of the filmic atonality "opening brand new routes in optical interpreting".
In the 30s his friend Federico GarcĂ*a Lorca, who guided him towards Manuel B. CossĂ*o, creator of the Museo PedagĂłgico (Museum of Pedagogy) and director of the InstituciĂłn Libre de Enseñanza (Free Institution of Teaching). Within few time, they founded a good relationship: CossĂ*o introduced him Antonio Machado and Val del Omar presented to them the first scholastic microfilm that would be presented at the 1st Spanish American Congress of Cinematography. So, a deep collaboration emerged between the Museo del Pueblo (Museum of the People) and the Misiones PedagĂłgicas (Pedagogical Missions) which was kept up during the years of the Republica. Val del Omar, missioner of the Prado paintings, photographies and projections was to film during his youth more than fifty 16 mm documentals of great ethnographic value (Las Hurdes, Malpica, la Valle d´Arán, Santiago de Compostela, Lorca, Totana).
This is part 1 of 3. Although I don´t speak/write Catalan nor understand it when spoken I tried my best to translate this text into English. If you detect any error, please report.
Val del Omar
Conference in the charge of Victoria Fonseca (Director of The Filmotheque of Andalusia)
Program
TrĂ*ptico elemental de España
Aguaespejo Granadino( 1953-1955, B/W, 23 min )
Fuego en Castilla (1958-1960, B/N i color, 17 min)
Acariño galaico (De barro) (1961, 1981-82, 1995, B/W, 24 min)
Val del Omar, renaissance
My father, JosĂ© Val del Omar, was born in Granada in 1904. He always felt deeply Andalusian and most exactly from Granada, "the meeting point between Eastern and Western Civilisations" as he usually quoted. In 1930, when he married MarĂ*a Luisa Santos, they went to a house in front of the Alhambra, actually the house-museum of Manuel de Falla. By means of papers and conversations with friends and relatives, he settled in Granada when he was twenty and had just arrived from Paris, making a business with Buick automobiles.
By that time he had bought a camera that he used to film his first movie, "En un rincĂłn de AndalucĂ*a" (which he produced, scripted, directed an photographed himself). The ambition of total authory will be with him for the rest of his days. This early filmic adventure was not going to express what he wanted, this fact making him move to Las Alpujarras to meditate. During half a year he was going to reflect on the mystic sense of the energy, on the matter and on the others. When somebody approached to him, he showed a magnifying glass and a magnet: those who were affected by the optic tool were called "Western"; the ones who chose the second object he considered them as "Eastern". Magnifying glasses and magnets were always in his pockets, laboratories and machines. He thought he was going to integrate both tools: analytic ability with emotive attraction.
His first techniques were spawned from those integral experiences. In 1928, the filmmaker Florián Rey, within the seminar Pantalla, spread as a headline "A Spanish lad invents two items that will cause a revolution in the art of the cinema". These were the variable angle lens and the non-panoramic concave screen. The first one, nowadays called "zoom", was patented by Zoomar company two years after. My father invented motivated by a expressive need: he wanted to film the Albayzin from the Alhambra. He wanted to approach to its houses and its people. The technique was the only possibility to surpass the physical limitations.
Those early inventions that, just like Leonardo, he intuited and made to satisfy his expressive demands precede a life full of ideas, images and projects that flowed for more than fifty years.
Filmmakers and artists of his generation for the most part had considered Val del Omar a scientific that was out of reach; for young technologists he was an untranslatable poet. He was never going to believe in the supposed dicotomy between Art and Technology. He was not a one-dimension man but a technician that communicated through art and an artist that generated new techniques to develop his expressivity. A German critic was going to proclaim his genius during the presentation of the film Aguasespejo Granadino at the Berlin Festival, describing him as "the Schönberg of the camera" and the discoverer of the filmic atonality "opening brand new routes in optical interpreting".
In the 30s his friend Federico GarcĂ*a Lorca, who guided him towards Manuel B. CossĂ*o, creator of the Museo PedagĂłgico (Museum of Pedagogy) and director of the InstituciĂłn Libre de Enseñanza (Free Institution of Teaching). Within few time, they founded a good relationship: CossĂ*o introduced him Antonio Machado and Val del Omar presented to them the first scholastic microfilm that would be presented at the 1st Spanish American Congress of Cinematography. So, a deep collaboration emerged between the Museo del Pueblo (Museum of the People) and the Misiones PedagĂłgicas (Pedagogical Missions) which was kept up during the years of the Republica. Val del Omar, missioner of the Prado paintings, photographies and projections was to film during his youth more than fifty 16 mm documentals of great ethnographic value (Las Hurdes, Malpica, la Valle d´Arán, Santiago de Compostela, Lorca, Totana).
This is part 1 of 3. Although I don´t speak/write Catalan nor understand it when spoken I tried my best to translate this text into English. If you detect any error, please report.