| Eugeni Bonet - ''Aimer : brûler. Incandescentes cendres de José Val del Omar'', Trafic #34, summer 2000 |
Galician Caress (of Clay), a film planned and shot in 1961-62 but not returned to until 1981-82, and unfinished at the time of Val del Omar's death as a result of a car crash, was painstakingly reconstructed and completed by Javier Codesal in 1995. Codesal, a creative talent who is fluently at ease in the various latitudes of art and the communications media, took as his basis a surviving workprint that Val del Omar had made, together with his handwritten notes and sound recordings. Val del Omar had found in Galicia, with its extremes of landscape, its changing moods, its meigas (witches) and saints and its pronounced chiaroscuros, the third of his ''three longings to communicate the ineffable'': motives and visual metaphors with which to approach this elementary of the land. A land that, with water, forms clay and life and that, with fire, dries and cracks. The earth of the profound Galicia and the stone of the architecture and monuments of Santiago de Compostela, the tombs and the cliffs, the clay figures by the sculptor Arturo Baltar and the ephemeral telluric consciousness of the human being; a land illumined, exposed to a diaphanous, penetrating transparent gaze, with new flashes of somnambulist tactilevision and sound collisions, in this work now happily recovered in spite of its inconclusive state.
Although this reconstruction is without the second diaphonic channel that Val del Omar had meant to add, the sound is precisely what weaves together the heterogeneity of the different iconic and acousmatic elements that follow on from one another over 24 minutes, grouped in what Codesal has called ''strophic series''; that is to say, the mecha-mystic poetic architecture in which, once again, the clear mystery of this work, in some sense posthumous or testamentary, is grounded. This construction takes on an atonal or serialist rigour for both the ear and the eye; for example, it links together the constant discordances between, on the other hand, the many negative images and images distorted using concave mirrors and other ''bionic optical'' resources and, on the other, the more objective (documentary or elementary, and apparently more rectilinear) images.
The same can be said of the continuous changes of sequential rhythm, which reaches its fastest, flickering pace in the middle of the film, or of the counterpoints that articulate the autonomy of the soundtrack as such between the deceptive continuity of a folk-music based score and the gaps or blasts of other – sometimes startling – interpolated sound fragments. The high point of the soundtrack comes at the end of the film, when Val del Omar indulges in a radically daring anachronism (significant, furthermore, of the peculiar chronology of the film's making), alternating the blustering imperatives of a radio adaptation of a Calderón de la Barca play, and the sound of the grotesque attempt at a coup d'état that took place on the 23rd of February, 1981, in the Spanish Parliament in Madrid.
^ | | | Rafael Rodríguez Tranche – “Cine y vanguardia en España (1975-1989)” (1991) |
| Gonzalo Sáenz de Buruaga – Val del Omar: sin fin (1992) |
| Javier Codesal - ''Sin salir del jardín. A propósito de Acariño Galaico'' (1996) |
| Eugeni Bonet - Trafic (2000) |
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