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Not only has the major part of Val del Omar's filmography of the 1930s disappeared, but it is also poorly documented. Of the dozens of documentaries he is said to have made for the Misiones Pedagógicas, all that has survived is the bare record of some of the places he visited with his camera. The list encompasses a large part of Spain's varied geography: from Andalucia (the Alpujarras, Málaga, Córdoba) to Galicia (Santiago de Compostela, Malpica, Finisterre) and the Catalan Pyrenees (the Val d'Aran), and from the Mediterranean coast (Murcia, Valencia) to various locations in the interior of Castilla, León and Aragón.
Among Val del Omar's most frequently cited works of these years, in addition to the documentaries of Murcia and Granada, now fortunately recovered, are the films devoted to Santiago de Compostela and to Las Hurdes, the latter in four reels.
We know that when the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez went to Puerto Rico, Luis Álvarez Santullano, the secretary of the Board in charge of the Missions, gave him some of these documentaries to show there. (What is more, according to Val del Omar, Jiménez was by mistake given various originals: Vibración de Granada, at least.) On the strength of this lead, in recent years inquiries have been made in archives and institutions in Puerto Rico and the United States, but so far these have not yielded any results.
As regards Val del Omar's filmmaking activity during the Civil War, it seems that he worked for some months as a technician on the Gráfico de Ingenieros newsreels produced by the Comandancia General de Ingenieros of the Republican forces under the command of Colonel Ardid, and is believed to have played a more important part in at least two documentaries: Gimnasio [Gymnasium] and Natación [Swimming], both from 1937, of which some footage survives in the Filmoteca Española.
He then moved to Valencia, where as an official of the Ministerio de Instrucción Pública he took part in salvaging the historical and artistic heritage under the direction of Josep Renau; he also collaborated in other activist initiatives with Renau, and became involved in radio, as detailed in another section of this website.
After Valencia fell to the rebels, Val del Omar was saved by his technical knowledge. He filmed the entry of the rebel troops on the 30th of March 1939, in a documentary entitled Liberación de Valencia that he presented on at least one occasion, at the Instituto de Cultura Hispánica in 1952. However, this film, its present whereabouts unknown, is not mentioned in the most complete reference work on the period, the Catálogo general del cine de la Guerra Civil by Alfonso del Amo and María Luisa Ibáñez (Cátedra and Filmoteca Española, Madrid, 1996), and it is quite possible that Val del Omar made it on his own initiative. [EB]
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