The trilogy that we know by this name today in fact began to be formulated as such in the last years of Val del Omar's life as the recapitulation of three films shot between 1953 and 1961, although the last was still unfinished at his death in 1982, and was completed posthumously.

He described the concept and the characteristics of the Triptych to Eugeni Bonet and José Manuel Palacio, curators of the cycle Cinéma d'avant-garde en Espagne: Une anthologie for the Musée Nationale d'Art Moderne at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

In synthesis he spoke to them of a triptych conceived as a diagonal running across Spain from west to east, taking as its motive the symbolic correspondence of the elements of earth (or air, in other interpretations), fire and water with other so many zones or regions of Spain: Galicia, Castilla and Andalucia (more precisely his native Granada). Similar premises are the subject of various extant notes in his own hand, even sketching out ideas for other formulas for the original films.

One of the peculiarities of the Triptych is that Val del Omar intended it to be screened in reverse order to the sequence of filming of the component ''elementaries''. Another is his intention to add a fourth part, using material he shot and edited much later, to serve as the ''vortex'' (prologue or epilogue) to the others, thus converting the triptych into an elementary tetralogy.

Among the ideas he noted down for making the whole something more that a mere series of independently conceived works were other changes intended to implicate them more closely with each other, such as expanding some and compressing (or even excerpting) others, as recorded in his notebooks.

At the same time it has been said that each of these elementaries was also conceived as a demonstration of a particular technique: diaphonic sound in Aguaespejo granadino [Water-mirror of Granada] and tactilevision in Fuego en Castilla [Fire in Castile], to which were added, when the occasion arose, apanoramic overflowing. On the other hand, this emphasis is not present in Acariño galaico [Galician Caress], his most austere film, although he does return to it in other subsequent experiments with the Bi-Standard format or the Palpicolor process. [EB]

^