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Val del Omar wanted to launch his career as filmmaker in the grand style: in 1925 he made a full-length film entitled En un rincón de Andalucía [In a Corner of Andalucia], of which very little is known, because he destroyed it. He said that in his dissatisfaction he stamped and trampled on the film until it was in shreds, and then took himself off to the Alpujarras mountains for several months to muse on ''the mystical sense of energy''. What is known is that this was an expensive venture for its time – the estimated cost was 150.000 pesetas – and that he shot 21.000 metres of negative, using a secondhand 35mm camera. It seems that he worked with non-professional actors and it can be inferred that the film combined elements of fiction and documentary in a story set in a gypsy milieu, with a blind heroine.
Two years later he made public a personal philosophy remarkable for its time in its visionary scope and in prefiguring all of his subsequent innovations in the artistic and technical fields.
Over the next few years he embraced a number of other projects, including an adaptation of three of Washington Irving's Tales of the Alhambra and a film version of the ballet The Three-cornered Hat by his revered Manuel de Falla. [EB]
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