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Ojala
ca. 1980 - 35mm Bi-Standard, B&W, silent, approx. 12 min.
This is a workprint in black and white put together from the footage that Val del Omar shot in Granada in 1968.
Ojala is the title he announced for the film with which he intended to culminate his work and that had conceived as a kind of epilogue –as he said, a ''vertex and vortex''– to the Tríptico Elemental de España.
However, this edit seems more like a note or draft, a kind of selection of images for a work that, as he described it, was destined to be far more complex, incorporating the PLAT technique in its final composition.
The following note was found also among Val del Omar's manuscripts: ''Half way through the editing I am leaving off El reloj al agua [The Watch to the Water], an Arab-Andaluz ShockScope with the following poetical motive: whoever wants to see God revealed in Granada must throw his watch into the water.''
At the same time the title Ojala comes from the Spanish expression ''Ojalá tires tu reloj al agua'' (''may God will that you throw your watch into the water''); however, Val del Omar often wrote and pronounced ''Ojala'' without placing the accent on the last syllable, probably to stress the Arabic origin of the word. It seems clear, then, that this note refers to the edit we are considering here.
The most interesting thing about his material is, in any case, the way the footage is ordered and edited. For example, the inversion of certain images and the editing of others in very rapid, even hectic rhythmic sequences. [EB]
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