Val del Omar is the foremost inventor of new techniques in Spanish-language cinema. He is, however, one of those Spanish artists that incarnate the eternal Spain and take us back to the most authentic expressive traditions of the original art and mysticism of the Iberian Peninsula. This is what the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México paid tribute to last year in awarding him 1st Prize in its Short Film Competition. Val del Omar's most recent work, Fuego en Castilla, is, like its predecessors, striking for the depth of its art as well as its technical qualities and its argument.
Artistically, the film recreates the atmosphere of an old Castilian town during Holy Week, parading the religious sculptures by artists from times gone by conserved in its churches. Shots of an impressive documentary verism are thus intermingled with tormented, turbulent images of Death, the Virgin and various saints. We witness a fantastic ballet that transports us to another world, foreshadowed in similar images by Serge Lifar and Eisenstein. The tortured rhythms of the Castilian sculptor Berruguete contain in embryo the distortions of El Greco, and the mysterious essence of the Spanish dance known as flamenco contributes its pulsations, in much the same way as Val del Omar appealed to Vicente Escudero, the most prestigious of Spanish dancers, with whom he composed the film's exceptional soundtrack: a score of concrete music performed by Escudero, drumming with his nails on the dry wood of a church altarpiece.
On a technical level, in this work Val del Omar interpolates three subliminally related techniques that he himself invented.
1) Diaphonic Sound, which received the backing of the French Conseil Supérieur Technique de la Cinématographie in the form of presentation sessions at the Cannes Film Festival in 1958. Diaphonic Sound creates a ''shock'' effect, between the spectator and the spectacle, with loudspeakers positioned in counter-field on the screen and at the back of the cinema. Val del Omar developed the system, which he patented in Spain in 1944, in his film Aguaespejo granadino, a lyrical work that fuses the Andalucian Siguiriya of the bailaor Antonio with images of the fountains of Granada. Last year this sound system, which goes beyond stereo, was adopted by Japanese television under the name of Esterama, and has also recently been taken up in Czechoslovakia and other countries where it is increasingly used as a ''shock'' sound.
2) TactilVisión. Tactilevision was described by a French commentator, on the occasion of its presentation by José Val del Omar at the V Salone Internazionale della Tecnica in Turin in 1955 as ''the consequence of a lighting intended to provoke, by a reflective arc, a sensation of touching and holding the illuminated objects, thus giving greater lustre to the surfaces, materials, substances, temperatures and times''. The technique was also the subject of a communication in the IV Colloque International organized by the Conseil Supérieur Technique de la Cinématographie in Paris in 1959. In Fire in Castilla, Val del Omar rounds out the volume of the images with a programmed accumulation of luminous perspectives, thus obtaining a real cubism of light.
3) Apanoramic Overflow. The theory was put forward for the first time in an article by Val del Omar in the journal of the Comisión Nacional de Productividad Industrial (Madrid 1957). This is an effect produced by the overlapping of two images: ''the central, defined and focused image'', Val del Omar wrote, ''is presented on the surface of the screen itself, and the second image, concentric and four times larger, appears as an out-of-focus ring or inductive framework for the first. This ring acts as a bridge and its images should be abstract''. In the present film, this technique is no more than suggested, in the form of subliminal luminous rhythmic effects.
In terms of plot or argument, Val del Omar's film lacks a logical sequence. As in the great works of Spanish mystical poetry – St John of the Cross and St Teresa – logic is a prison from which we have to break out of. ''The force of gravity'', Val del Omar wrote, ''is a curse from which we only find release by burning''. But this profound interior logic – the logic of ''substance'' – can be followed in the three parts into which the film are divided, which gradually elevate us from the plane of reality to the heights of ecstasy.
In the first of these three parts, in the manner of a symphony, we are taken on a documentary walk, shot during the Holy Week processions in Valladolid: black crepes hang from the balconies, the religious pasos make their way down silent streets, the sky is an acrid grey, Christ tries to protect himself from the rain with a plastic raincoat.
In the second part, after seeing Death accompany the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise on his guitar, and after being jolted by a 100 mile-an-hour mambo in a train of tractor-drawn carriages, we enter into the Dark Night: Death is the star. Death is always present, above all, in the mobile expressions of the Burgundian sculptor Juan de Juni's St Ann. This is the procession of Death, and with it we go down under his great cold canopy.
But in the third part comes the light, the light of the fire that crackles in the ascending ecstasy of the Berruguete images. A repeated explosion of ardour and rhythms makes the film a huge bonfire. The old face of Death, St Ann, is consumed in the fire that elevates and purifies...
Because ''death is no more than a word when it is loved''.
In 1956, on the occasion of the screening of another Val del Omar film, Aguaespejo granadino, at the Berlin Film Festival, the German critic Konrad Haemmerling wrote in Der Tagesspiegel:
''Like a Schönberg of the camera, he reveals to us the atonality of the language of film. He transcribes the physiognomy of a people's soul through the reality of nature. [...] He jolts and startles the spectator with profound shocks, and surprises us with always new and explosively expressive images. In this way there emerge Goyesque phantasmagorias and nightmare visions in which the gods and demons of the world reveal themselves, exposing the chaos behind the mask of order. There is no presentation that can compare with this unique event.''
Fire in Castilla stands comparison with that event, and even surpasses it: this is a better and more mature work, a Val del Omar even deeper than that which made the mystery and the tragedy of the Andalucian soul sing in Aguaespejo granadino. Just as that other great Andalucian, Manuel de Falla, who created his finest works when, having reflected the colourism of Andalucia, he discovered severe Castilla (El Retablo de Maese Pedro or the Concerto for Harpsichord), so Val del Omar felt as if he had been struck dumb in Castilla, in the centre of Spain. In Fire in Castilla, Val del Omar confronts the Castilian plateau, the cruel and colourless misery of the heart of Spain. And his new work is thus purer, drier, more essential, like a piece of kindling that has no other destiny than to be burnt.
^ | | | Filmespaña, supplement no. 3, 1961 |
| Texts that shed light on Fire in Castilla |
| programme notes |
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