| |
|
|
Val del Omar made use of the humble Super-8 format from 1973 or earlier (this date can be fixed thanks to images he filmed from the television). Of this footage, amounting to about two hours of film, we can distinguish, grosso manner, between private footage and picto-luminic experiments.
The first category includes spontaneous records of pleasure and business trips, of his immediate environment, of the people he had dealings with, and of the television broadcasts that annoyed or appealed to him (among the latter, the series Kung Fu, for example)... and also what amounts to notebook jottings of motives that recur throughout his work. Thus some of the footage he shot in Granada focuses on motives already present in his 35mm films: the paradisiacal garden of the Alhambra, the ''tourists slipping along'', the patterns made by running water.
On the other hand, the records of his picto-luminic experiments can more readily be seen as notes and tests for their own sake of his ongoing and constant pursuit of the PLAT unity he was searching for, and for what he at some point believed might be a commercial outlet for his experiments: ''recreational entertainments on TV, from 1 to 3 minutes''. That is to say, idents, miniatures or inserts to fill the breaks in continuity between television programmes. [EB]
^ |
|
| |
|
|
