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Festival en las Entrañas / Festival in the bowels
1963-1964 - 35mm, colour, 25 min.
Although this project is part of the Festivales de España series, with all of the doubts and uncertainties that surround that project, it merits a section of its own, because it is clearly the camouflaged ''elementary'' with which Val del Omar sought to divert toward his native soil what was, from his description, a documentary series with a personal commitment: his purpose was evidently to earn some money in return for exercising an institutional function and creating a showcase for Spanish folk culture.
In his overall summary of the series, Val del Omar emphasized that this would only have a certain documentary value on the basis of its segmented serial conception, and that ''taken together, these documents could not be shown unless they were shortened by 100 minutes''. And, if the total running time were to be reduced by that amount, it can be inferred that the most creative and personal part of the proposed series would be this tenth and last section.
Val del Omar's list of the series as a whole and its component parts contains the following notes on this section:
''It is very difficult to explain the surreal content that segments the following parts:
Visit on muleback of Swedish tourists to a traditional farmhouse.
A village with duende spirits on the lime.
Nightfall in Arcos de la Frontera.
The cave of Nerja.
Searching in the bowels of the earth for the ancestral character that helps us to burn.
Festivities for the grape harvest in Jerez.
Observations: The colour and sound of this continuity could win an international prize.''
It appears, furthermore that just as he had previously done with Aguaespejo granadino and Fuego en Castilla, Val del Omar hoped to make this piece a kind of showcase and aesthetic manifesto of one of his visionary or ''mecha-mystical'' techniques; in this instance Palpicolor, involving an innovative application of electronic technology in conventional cinematography. Apparently, this precocious idea never got off the drawing board. He killed himself working, as he noted, for the sake of what turned out to be an irredeemably conservative and outdated project, and here was the prize or the international recognition he had hoped for never materialized. [EB]
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