| Some remarks by the director |
A hybrid film by virtue of being put together digitally and of constituting an interpretation of the truncated work of another artist: this would be a possible definition of the artefact that has kept me busy for two years. It seems to me that José Val del Omar, with whom I was briefly acquainted, was not a eccentric or avant-garde filmmaker but neither more nor less than an amateur. I use the term with the greatest respect, as Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage or Jean Cocteau did, in the sense of a lover or, as Val del Omar himself suggested, a 'believer in the cinema', with the soul of the 'beloved transformed into the Lover', to cite St John of the Cross, a volume of whom he always kept by his bedside.
Val del Omar was an amateur filmmaker who shot his best known and most widely admired works in 35mm, and at the same time made a considerable number of technical and mechanical innovations that he addressed to the area of industrial cinema and audio-visual production. However, during the 1970s he became increasingly involved with Super-8 and video, and in areas that are now thought of as multimedia, much as we amateurs who were learning and starting out then did; and however much we rejected the epithet it is, I insist, a term of distinction more than opprobrium.
Hence the sense of proximity that gave me the courage to take Val del Omar's images as my own: not to give a posthumous conclusion to the 'vortex' with which he sought to crown his oeuvre – 'slight, but of high tension', as film historian Román Gubern has written – but in a free yet devoutly faithful interpretation of materials that were raw (or only partially orderly) and for the most part never previously screened. These include footage in 35mm, 16mm and Super-8 and the slides that he brought to life with the techniques he called PLAT (Picto-Luminic-Audio-Tactile).
As for guide elements, there was little more than a ten-minute workprint in black and white, identified by the title Ojala (that is to say, 'if Allah or God wills'), one of those considered by Val del Omar for the vortex film I mentioned earlier, although this montage was surely no more than a first draft in relation to the far more complex idea of the film as I heard it from his own lips; but, above all, the thing that has served me best in building up these 'variations on a intuited cinegraphy' is the mass of annotations by Val del Omar himself, mostly handwritten on a great variety of notebooks and sheets of paper.
The film is structured in four sections or movements, plus an introductory segment, and the following list of Val del Omarian 'embers' may perhaps serve as a peculiar synopsis:
- Open gardens. Delirious low sky. Granada-a blaze.
- Closed paradise. Garden with eyes. Tourists drifting.
- Pulses of light. Visionary grace. Taste of grenadine.
- Diluted worlds. Handfuls of time. Miracle of water.
And yet, far from constituting a mosaic or compendium of distinct, autonomous segments, I believe I have arrived at an overall cohesion – an atonal harmony of apparently opposing, disparate or dissonant elements – that is faithful in its turn to one of the premises noted by Val del Omar: 'the leap from the documentary to total craziness'. So I would say that it is by own intuition that I have approached what he foresaw as 'a dream of unusual intuited cinematography, in that its images float around with no apparent coherence'.
Finally, the matter of the film is something that everyone who sees it will have to discover for themselves, given the constant sliding between the objective and the abstract. However, by way of prelude there is Val del Omar's voice expounding a number of considerations that, even although these refer to other of his cinegraphies, also strike me as relevant to my apocryphal variations. This is so, for instance, when he speaks of a 'poetic elementary on the force of gravity' and of 'visions of dynamic ecstasy that might accompany a short manual of exercises for reaching a higher plane'.
Finally, the matter of the film is something that everyone who sees it will have to discover for themselves, given the constant sliding between the objective and the abstract. However, by way of prelude there is Val del Omar’s voice expounding a number of considerations that, even although these refer to other of his cinegraphies, also strike me as relevant to my apocryphal variations. This is so, for instance, when he speaks of a ‘poetic elementary on the force of gravity’ and of ‘visions of dynamic ecstasy that might accompany a short manual of exercises for reaching a higher plane’.
Eugeni Bonet
^ | | | Eugeni Bonet - some remarks by the director |
| Mara Villas - On the background and the guts of the project |
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